IvyTong2001 - UX & UI Pathway

Starting date of internship: August 3rd 2020

Overview of Things Learned:

Technical Skills:

  • Following the Design Thinking Framework
  • Recruiting participants for interviews
  • Planning for interviews
  • Conducting interviews
  • Creating insights from interviews
  • Sketching
  • Creating low-fidelity prototypes
  • Creating high-fidelity prototypes
  • Wireframing

Tools: Miro, Mural, Figma

Soft Skills: Teamwork, project management, presentation, communication, collaborative brainstorming, problem solving

Three achievement highlights:

  1. Successfully conducting two interviews and creating extremely helpful insights from them
  2. Brainstorming feasible solutions to our problems using user insights from our interviews
  3. Learning how to use a new tool, Miro, as a resource for creating information radiators

List of meetings/ training attended: All team meetings except one, which I was excused from and all sub-group meetings except for one

Goals for the upcoming week: Create a mid-fidelity prototype and hopefully, get to creating a high-fidelity prototype of the messaging system for STEMAway

Tasks completed:

  1. Creating two task flows illustrating how an user would accomplish two tasks on the STEMAway platform
  2. Creating a stakeholder map of STEMAway
  3. Creating empathy maps of STEMAway users
  4. Planning, managing, and conducting interviews with current and potential users of STEMAway
  5. Collaborating on creating an affinity map of all the insights gathered from our group’s interviews
  6. Collaboratively creating “How Might We” statements to brainstorm how to fix “pain points” on the platform
  7. Collaboratively generating an impact feasibility matrix to distinguish which of our solutions would be feasible
  8. Creating sketches/storyboards illustrating my group’s vision of the messaging system on STEMAway
  9. Creating an information architecture to plan and design the information structure of our group’s messaging system

Hurdles:

  • Improving upon previous prototypes
    • Solution: Our group bounced ideas off of each other to brainstorm improvements that addressed pain points identified by our interviews
  • Conducting interviews in a confident and unbiased manner
    • Solution: Thorough planning and practicing beforehand