Daniel Thorson
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Overview
This is my first case study for the Google UX Design Course that I am currently progressing through. The assigned concept for this project was to create an app design that let's users reserve seats in a movie theater. I am using the User Centered Design methodology for this project.
This is a work in progress and I will be adding to this case study as my progress continues.
My Roles
Key Developments
I interviewed individuals from differing age groups, genders, ethnicity, education and locations. Gathering a wider demographic helped me understand the needs of a larger group of users each with their own background and experiences. I collected qualitative research by asking open ended questions in order to listen and observe the individual's perspective. This also helped me to avoid any of my own bias.
After studying the interviews for awhile I was able to create several personas to represent the different user's needs based off of the research I had collected. These personas represented the demographics I interviewed, their pain points and goals. This allowed me to combine the user's needs together as well as put the focus on those needs in a way that was easy to understand and communicate to others.
After interviewing the individuals and creating the personas, I was able to generate problem statements that were clear and focused on finding solutions to those user's problems. These were all based on real pain points that the individuals expressed during the UX research phase. In order to solve the user's problem you must first have a solid understanding of what that problem is.
This user journey map helped me comprehend the user's tasks, empathize with their feelings along every step of the way and ultimately find opportunities for improvements to the user's journey. This also gave me some ideas for other features that hadn’t occurred to me in the beginning. One such idea was a seat suggestions feature that would list seats in different categories.
I created a Big Picture story board across several panes to explore the users experience. This macro scale reflects the user journey map I created and conveys the overall experience the user might have with the product. This story board directly addresses the pain points I came across in my UX research. I've had prior experiences with story boarding as an cg artist, so this was a lot of fun to create.
Here is another story board but this time it is a Close Up perspective. This was intended to quickly explore the possible interaction and experience the user might have with the product. This rough draft helped me to start getting some ideas on how to solve some of the user's problems that came up in the research I had conducted. It also helped me start contemplating next steps for wireframing.
I started sketching my wireframes on paper. This helped me iterate quickly and allowed me to get some ideas laid out without any commitments to a certain design. I made lots of sketches and then drew them again combining elements that I liked.
I translated my paper wireframes into digital wireframes in Figma where I was able to visually improve upon the interface designs. is where the visual design really started to come alive.
1. A clear map of the theater seating layout was the most desired feature that came up during the Foundational Research phase.
2. After studying the personas and user journey maps I had created, it occurred to me that creating seat categories would directly address Some specific user's needs.
I created a lo-fi working prototype for my usability studies. Using complex layering of components with variants inside of each other, I was able to create a sophisticated emulation of the app without having to use very many frames in Figma, meaning that making large scale changes were quick and easy. This also gave true interactivity so that any seat could be selected just as a real app would.