Design thinking workshop
Improving the user experience for Carousel app
This was a workshop conducted in First Media Design school where I was a facilitator and design mentor for a group of 10 students from diverse backgrounds. I designed and facilitated the workshop with the purpose to come out with ways to help students understand the collaborative working environment in a lean UX setup. The project case study was to improve the existing app experience of Carousel.
SCOPE
Usability test​
Design sprint
ROLE
Workshop Facilitator
Program Trainer
Design Mentor
The process
Students were each assigned different roles within an organization. Some of the roles had to work in teams while some would be individual contributors. The purpose of such workshops is to foster real-life scenarios of actual product team sprints. The entire workshop was created to help students understand the design thinking process and applied it using a UX centered process to solve Carousel users' challenges when using the app.
Timeline:
6 hours
Student demographics:
Working adults between age 23 to 36
Organizational roles assigned to students:
Marketing manager, Brand Strategist, UI designer, Tech officer, UX writer, UX designer
Toolkits:
Discovery:
Brand analysis, competitive analysis, stakeholder analysis, SWOT, contextual inquiry, heuristics evaluation, epic story(scenario design)
Define:
Affinity mapping, user flows, persona, user journey
Design:
Wireframing, paper mock-ups
Prototype:
lo-fi and mid-fi prototypes (Adobe XD), usability testing
Strategy
Students were taught how to conduct strategic research and make basic strategic business acumen through SWOT analysis and competitor research.
Design scenarios
Using the design scenario approach to anticipate and give assumptions for possible outcomes. We explore how things can be worse or better.
Marketing strategies
We explored the digital strategy on building the solution around the problem from an outside-in approach rather than the silo working style like an inside-out approach which is often times myopic and counter productive.
Epic stories
Students were taught the technique for creating epic stories which develop into smaller user stories. This allows them to get a good idea of how features worked and helped them in their design.
Personas and user flows
Creating proto-personas and the respective user flows from a hypothetical approach help students gain clarity and made first-hand decisions.
Prototype
Students were taught Adobe XD to work on the prototypes. They did another round of usability testing on the existing prototypes within themselves and some other users.
Conclusion
It was a great learning experience for the students. They managed to get an idea of how they could use design thinking in their work together with the applied methodology of lean UX.
