General Assembly UXDI Project 2: Via
By: Alice Wang
Tags: Ux Writing, Ux Strategy, UX, UX Design, UX Research

My Role: UX Designer| Duration: 2 Weeks| Project Status: Completed

Personal Note: Whew! I survived Week 3! After being thrown into Project 1 , I was quite honestly dreading the second project. Thankfully, the UX concepts have slowly been seeping into my brain, and this time around the process seemed to go by much smoother and enjoyable!

Project 2 Overview

Our second project was our first experience working in teams within our cohort at General Assembly.

Teams were given briefs to add specific features into already existing app companies. Our client was Via (real company, fictional project) and our objective was to develop a feature that would promote social interactions between drivers and passengers. Limitations centered around devising a seamless social feature into the already-existing app without creating further inconvenience for the user and protecting their personal information.

Initial Problem Statement

Our initial problem statement was based on the idea of solving the problem of exposing passengers’ information to a wider net of Via users, while still protecting their privacy.

How might we help passengers and drivers make connections after the ride while maintaining confidentiality?

Some initial assumptions made about our Via target users were that they were open to connecting with fellow passengers or drivers and saw the potential for a Via ride to be the start of a new adventure.

User Interviews, Personas and Ideation Process

Our team created a survey with questions about ridesharing app usage in an effort to find target users who use Via for interviews. This was a bit of a challenge as there are a plethora of ridesharing apps in competition out in the marketplace today (the big juggernauts Uber and Lyft, along with smaller companies such as Juno or Gett). We eventually found five Via users and asked interview questions centered around their Via rideshare experience and social preferences.

The insights found in general were that they are young working professionals who use Via frequently to get to work and use Via because of the low price. Two personality traits started to emerge from the data: one was anti-social and cared about safety or preferred to keep to themselves during the ride. One personality was more conversational and would talk to fellow riders or drivers depending on their mood.

Through these, we were able to create personas: Debbie the Doctor and Hannah the Hustler. Debbie was the more anti-social user who cared about Via’s efficiency and price while Hannah was a social butterfly who enjoyed conversations with strangers and wasn’t in a rush. These personas were helpful to create as they would guide our future brainstorming sessions and help us focus on how to solve their problems, as opposed to adding features that were outside of the scope of the problem statement.

Through design exercises such as running a design studio, creating MoSCoW maps and Feature Prioritization Matrix, the team brainstormed and prioritized the core features to add into the Via app.

The key takeaways were that we needed to seamlessly add our social features into the existing app interface without compromising on the core ride sharing purpose that users were coming to Via for.

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes and Round 1 Usability Tests

Our mid-fidelity prototypes served the purpose of being able to test out the basic functions of the features we wanted to add without spending a lot of time working on the details of a more polished product. The three features added were a Social Mode setting to allow profile visibility or privacy, the ability to connect with fellow passengers in one’s Trip History, and the ability to reply back to fellow passengers in one’s inbox.

After testing our prototype with five users, we learned that some of the app design and wording was confusing, such as the wording of “History” in the main navigation menu and location of specific settings.

High-Fidelity Wireframes and Round 2 Usability Tests

We added the testing feedback into our high fidelity design and made changes based on the feedback we got from our users in Round 1.

We updated the navigation menu wording to “Trip History,” added the Social Mode passenger icons directly on the Trip History page and expanded the email within the same screen to reduce user effort and click count.

After testing with five new users, the test findings showed a 20% increase in user success rate of accomplishing tasks. Additionally, we discovered that users are concerned with drivers having their profile information and would like the ability to modify their Social settings for fellow riders and drivers separately.

Final Prototype

The final prototype presented at the end of the project incorporated the feedback we received in Round 2 of usability testing. We adjusted the social settings to be more personalized between fellow passengers and driver options, changed inbox messages to be in chronological order and added a search function in the Trip History screen to find fellow passengers by name.

The future next steps would be to conduct another round of usability testing with additional users with our final prototype to test new feature suggestions called out by users during testing.

Link to Final Prototype

Reflection

In terms of the project itself, the testing in mid to high-fidelity was easier as the design lent more visual cues to users on how to follow the “happy trail” and the presentation of the test was as if it was the real app.

Working in Sketch is my next personal growth challenge and I plan to continue practicing how to use the program. I don’t have prior extensive training in any design program in particular (only minor exposure to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator) so while using Sketch has been a steeper learning curve, I’ve loved the process.