Kanu_Priya - UX & UI (Level 2) Pathway

My week-2 journey:

Week 2 was about generative Research-Data gathering. As a team, we drafted questions for semi-structured interview. Then we conducted interview with the participants, mentors and leads of the Bioinformatics project, we gathered the insights and presented them in the form of personas.


What all I have learnt:

Technical Area:

  • Generative Research -
  • To generate the understanding of the potential users and also to understand bit more about the project, generative research was conducted.

  • Stakeholder Map -
  • Stakeholders are the most important part of a research. As part of deliverables, a stakeholder map was created. Primary, secondary and tertiary stakeholders were identified but the major focus was on primary ones.

  • Semi-Structured Interview -
  • For gathering data about the Bioinformatics project and the potential users, Semi-Structured interviews were conducted. Mentors, Leads and participants of the pathway were interviewed.

  • Affinity Mapping -
  • After the data collection one of the best way to categorize and present information and insights is to create affinity mapping. This not only clarifies the goals and objectives but also direct towards the solution.

  • Persona Building -
  • Persona is one of a good way to represent stakeholder's perspective. A persona should include frustrations, goals, needs and expectations and must be an appropriate representative of users.

Tools:

  • Discord: All the in-group communication took place on the stem-away discord channel.
  • Zoom: All the meetings were conducted on a zoom call. Even the sessions were on zoom.
  • Miro Board: All the data collected was stored in the form of post it notes on miro-board as it is really appealing to the eyes.
  • Figma: The presentation was created on figma.
  • Trello: Trelllo is used as a common platform where we include all the schedule, links work. Basically it is a dashboard of our team.
  • Slack: To contact the people from Bioinformatics project and to send outreach letters, slack was used.

Soft Skills:

  • Teamwork
  • Leadership skills
  • Communication and Networking skills
  • Time management
  • Cooperation

Achievements:

  • In a session conducted by Debaleena, I tried to understand the goals and need of Bioinformatics people regarding the project.
  • After getting a fair idea about the functionality and goals of the project, I along with one of my fellow member, drafted questions for semi-structured interview.
  • I was capable of drafting questions which are not misleading and are open ended so as to give participants more opportunity to speak on the topic.
  • I categorized the questions into two categories, one for those who have some background in bioinformatics and other for those who are currently working on the project. The categorization was appreciated by Anthony(head).
  • I presented my part to the heads in the meeting.

Goals for week 3:

  • Updating personas based on the feedback received from Anthony. Thiw will require adding more sections to the personas like frustrations, goals, needs and expectations.
  • Creating Journey maps based on the data collected from generative research. This will require creating scenario mappings and task flow.Then presenting them in the form of a journey map.

Tasks done and challenges faced:

  • Managing time and having regular meets is the most challenging part of this internship. As almost everyone in my team is from a different time zone and the zones differ by twelve hours and thirty minutes, choosing a time that suits is all is really hard :(
  • Earlier, I have conducted interview but with the people I have acquainted with. But this time, although I did not conduct the interview but I witnessed it and realized that taking interview is not just about talking. It is about observing how the interviewee reacts, his gestures, his interests and along with these you have to make notes, unbiased notes, specific notes. It requires a lot of concentration and efforts.
  • Successfully drafted semi-structure interview questions.
  • Presented questionnaire to the heads.
  • Explored Trello and Figma.

My week-3 journey:

Week 3 was about generative Research-Data Analysis. As a team, we conducted few more interviews with the participants, mentors and leads of the Bioinformatics project, we created two personas and two journey maps.


What all I have learnt:

Technical Area:

  • Generative Research -
  • To generate the understanding of the potential users and also to understand bit more about the project, generative research was conducted.

  • Semi-Structured Interview -
  • For gathering data about the Bioinformatics project and the potential users, Semi-Structured interviews were conducted. Mentors, Leads and participants of the pathway were interviewed.

  • Persona Building -
  • Persona is one of a good way to represent stakeholder's perspective. A persona should include frustrations, goals, needs and expectations and must be an appropriate representative of users.

  • UX- Data visualization -
  • User research tells you what data the user needs, visualization principles tell you how to get it to them. We created journey maps for the visualization of generative research done.

  • Journey Mapping -
  • Journey maps allow us to visualize the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish his or her goal..

Tools:

  • Discord: All the in-group communication took place on the stem-away discord channel.
  • Zoom: All the meetings were conducted on a zoom call. Even the sessions were on zoom.
  • Miro Board: Personas and journey maps were created on miro board.
  • Figma: The presentation was created on figma.
  • Trello: Trelllo is used as a common platform where we include all the schedule, links work. Basically it is a dashboard of our team.

Soft Skills:

  • Teamwork
  • Leadership skills
  • Communication and Networking skills
  • Time management
  • Cooperation

Achievements:

  • Based on the feedback, persona's were updated.
  • Few more interviews were conducted to gather more data.
  • Going through the scenarios, we created journey maps that align with user's need.
  • In journey map, all the possibilities of errors and challenges were taken care by us.

Goals for week 4:

  • Creating Storyboards for each persona. This will require understanding of how storyboards work and what would be the possible storyline that appropriately represents stakeholders.
  • Creating UX Flowchart based on the data collected from generative research. This will require creating a blueprint of the service. How user will go through each process and what can be the possible hurdles.

Tasks done and challenges faced:

  • Managing time and having regular meets is the most challenging part of this internship.
  • Earlier, I have created storyboards but never for a real project. It takes a lot of effort to understand a diversified about of stakeholders and come up with one conclusion.
  • Journey map was quite difficult as there were many possible options for navigating.

My week-4 journey:

Week 4 was about Design Ideation. As a team, we created two UX-Flowchart and storyboard for each persona.


What all I have learnt:

Technical Area:

  • Storyboarding -
  • Storyboarding helps us to visualize how our target users will interact with our designs.

  • UX-Flowcharts -
  • UX flowcharts help visualize every possible step a user takes to complete a task or achieve a goal on your site or app.

Tools:

  • Discord: All the in-group communication took place on the stem-away discord channel.
  • Zoom: All the meetings were conducted on a zoom call. Even the sessions were on zoom.
  • Miro Board: Storyboard and flowchart were created on miro board.
  • Figma: The presentation was created on figma.
  • Trello: Trelllo is used as a common platform where we include all the schedule, links work. Basically it is a dashboard of our team.

Soft Skills:

  • Teamwork
  • Leadership skills
  • Communication and Networking skills
  • Time management
  • Cooperation

Achievements:

  • Based on the feedback received from heads and Team 3, journey map was improved.
  • Storyboards were quite specific covering user needs and frustrations.
  • From team3 work, I gained really good insights and it expanded my thinking. It will hopefully help in making the Low-fi prototype more user friendly.

Goals for week 5:

  • Building a complete wireframe set of the design proposal guided by research findings and design principles.
  • Lay the wireframes out into wireflows to convey interactions.

Tasks done and challenges faced:

  • Managing time and having regular meets is the most challenging part of this internship.
  • Flowchart was really confusing and difficult to make because it's a real project and we need to cater to stakeholder's needs.
  • Storyboarding was fun, it is really engaging and easy to understand visualization of data gathered.