School of digital craftsmanship - 2015
Overview:
Ten weeks immersive program focused on user-centered design principals and methodologies taught by Carolyn Chandler. Instructor and author of some of my favorite UX training books, Adventures in Experience Design and A Project Guide to UX Design.
The ten week program was created to help designers and researchers advance in their careers. We were assigned to work with a real client (Canine Link) to design an online 101 dog training concept. CanineLink provides state of the art, science-based canine behavior education programs to dog enthusiasts, pet professionals and pet industry businesses.
Challenge:
Develop a functional prototype demonstrating an online dog training tool that will help dog owners improve with training their pets and help them understand all their the needs. Pitch the prototype to a real client while following design principles being taught in the user-center program.
The Process:
We were split in two groups of four and were assigned specific roles and tasks to complete before each class. We started with foundational research by interviewing dog owners and enthusiasts out in the field. We created a contextual inquiry guide to follow during our interview process. After a couple weeks of interviewing we gathered all the insights and organized the must and nice to have categories in High-rise. The categories helped us create the user-flow. After creating the user-flow and style tiles we were able to assign each person specific tasks to complete for review before each class. I worked closely with the UX designer and help implement the visuals for the wire-frames. The UX Designer worked on adding the elements and interactions on the page and I was focused on polishing the UI with the proper photos, colors and affordance. After a few weeks of presenting and collaborating with the team we were ready to test our-high fidelity, interactive prototype to potential users at 1871. We tested the prototype with six individuals and received helpful feedback that addressed our final changes before presenting to our client.
Outcome:
We presented our final prototype to our client and received some final changes. The results of the changes let the client move forward with creating their online dog training website using our designs that fulfilled the dog training criteria for both dog owners and our client.
Tools:
Highrise and mural.ly for communication and brainstorming ideas. Balsamiq, marvel and photoshop for interactivity and visuals. User-feel for testing the prototype with real users.