3. Iterate, iterate and iterate again. Have you iterated today?
It is a steep learning curve from research to a digital and interactive prototype. “We have all the initial data gathered, we have ideas, we have many things… then what?”
In many moments this is the question that repeatedly we have “Then what?”. Envisaging to answer this staggering and paralysing question, from time to time, one of the team members would say “what did we learn from research?”. Well, we did learn, but how to make it actionable?
The first iterations happened within the team. Some ideas that one of us could be very invested, other participants would be not so interested. So the process of diverging and converging, as shown in Figure 1, encompassed many of our steps.
Figure 1
The time constraints also contributed to the converge stages. The most independent moment of each team member was derived from creating the first low-fidelity paper prototype. It allowed us to express our vision of how an application should be structured. After these sketches, as shown in Figure 2, we discussed visually and strategically the steps we aimed with it.
Figure 2
Based on the paper sequences, we decided on which flow we would work. To fill in the gaps, one of us re-drew it, making sense of the screens as a whole. It generated an initial flow of 14 screens, expandable in the bot dialogue, and filters.
We chose our Design System based on a wide variety of reasons that we can highlight, such as:
- Consistency
- Recognisable calls to action and structure by users
- Simplicity of elements
- Impartiality of visual elements (not addressed to any particular group)
- Solutions for a significant number of interactions
- Well documented design system
Those were the most substantial reasons for us to stick with Google Material Design. We wanted to keep the same line of the actual Indeed App, focusing on improving it, rather than create another visual identity. We learned from our research that mobile apps did not have native chatbots, being more common to redirect users to other platforms such as Facebook and Whatsapp. However, one of the most critical issues that our interviewees described was the necessity of visiting other websites and platforms, making it clear to us that would not be an alternative.
Besides that, mobile devices inherently have size constraints that must be addressed to fit their purposes and eliminate the proneness to an error. Faulty interfaces have been persistently described as one of the most common causes of frustration since they mislead users into undesirable actions.
Examples of the first prototype utilising Google Material Design in a high-fidelity interactive prototype (Figure 3):
Figure 3
Image 4
The final version of the prototype (Video):
Figure 5
It is crystal clear that iterations modified greatly our prototype from conception (paper) to interactive prototype (Figma). The evolutive process is undeniable, and many of our assumptions were proved wrong.
Reference List:
Brignull, H., & Darlington, A. (n.d.). Dark Patterns. Https://Darkpatterns.Org/. Retrieved 23 January 2021, from https://darkpatterns.org/
Cooper, A., Reimann, R., & Cronin, D. (2014). About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (4th ed.). Wiley.
Horton, S., Quesenbery, W., & Gustafson, A. (2014). A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences (1st ed.). Rosenfeld Media.
Nielsen Norman Group. (2020). The double diamond model [Graph]. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/discovery-phase/
Rosala, M. (2020). The Discovery Phase in UX Projects. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/discovery-phase/
