“It is not the first time I’ve tried to kick myself out the house to start running. When step out the yard and look at some gray cloud is moving, I blamed the bad weather and convince myself to stay at home in order to watching a favorite movie. How I wish to start a new habit has turned to a sad story which has been reduplicated for half of the year. I start worrying what I could not have enough courage and method to do one extra step. Do something. At least one.”
“I haven’t never had enough courage to speak in front of a group. The reason is not because I felt nervous. I was not panic at all. The moment I stand out and my lips has been tried to open, a voice spoke in my mind that I can not and my brain was totally empty. I think I won’t never be able to speak my voice. However, I wish I could. I haven been watching some videos about how to speak in front of people and those presentations were great. My husband also encouraged me to try it one. I want to change, at least one, but from where. I got lost, my worriness came back and told me to give up.”
Those two stories ask a question: Why do we give up to change something? For some people, the change is seen as a mysterious creature that will destroy their world if they ever dare to touch it. People are afraid of the unknown mystery and the change is blindly moving until the day some result is revealed. The process might take months, years or even many years. As a designer, I have been searching for a solution to help people remain their change habits longer. And Hakage was born.
Needfinding
A design idea always comes from the real needs. A need is shown up through observing people’s activity in everyday life. By watching how people do their work, listen to their complaints about their daily habits, and observe how their emotions change. Human’s face and expression tells a lot of what they want and how they think. As a designer, I enjoyed listening and taking note of most of their words, their pose, their face expression and what they do. When I see someone becomes angry and impatient while he could not understand a text in website, I found an opportunity to design something new. By that way, the design process focuses on the Human Center or in other ways of saying: human is the key.
Ideation
After following people, observing their daily life and also taking note of the problems around them, my note is filled with highlight marks where the craziest ideas have been born. Excellent design ideas sometimes come from unexpected stories. I have always expressed my design ideas as comic stories. Drawing storyboards are one of the best creative methods to verify how your idea could solve user’s needs. During the ideation phase, one rule of thumb is the more, the better. Judgement is the evil. You should forget all of the scene's theories and principles.
Prototype
One the design idea has been born, let’s make a quick and simple prototype so you are able to test your idea with real users in the very early phase. Testing is really important to make sure your design process always stick to the needs. A professional designer is not the one who is able to create a beautiful UI, instead of that, he could show up his idea with just pen and paper. Always remember pen and paper are our best friends. We need to show up our ideas as early as possible. Testing, improving, testing, improving — those processes repeats again and again so we will never step out of user’s needs.
Heuristic Evaluation
When the prototype is ready, the very first testing should be done in between the development team members before sending it to test users. We want to verify the prototype one again and make sure the prototype conveys our design ideas to test users. Sometimes, the design prototype has gone too far with the initial plan, and it is not what we want. The goal of Heuristic Evaluation is to evaluate the design works or not, helpful or helpless by using the scale of Jakob Nielsen’s Ten Usability Principles. Remember to keep in mind that the prototype is just a prototype, thus, aesthetic and cosmetic problems are not in our concern.
Here is the guide of How to evaluate Heuristic Evaluations.
Plan and Implementation
Heuristic Evaluation gave us some ideas about what should be improved before showing to users. Based on the Issue Ranking, problems rated with higher ranking needs to be fixed first. When the change is planned, I started implement the high-fidelity design by using Figma. Figma is a convenient and useful tool to create an intuitive and interactive mobile application. The tools are functional enough to serve your needs from black and white wireframe to an interactive final demo.
Hakage demo prototype made by Figma
Testing
The final design is ready to show to users and start testing. I had created two version (A and B) to test two hypotheses of my application structure. To do the A/B test, there must be two link to two version prototypes and users are split into two groups. One will do test version A and the other test version B. We need to record the user’s interaction in this test in order to analyze some measurements like: numbers of clicking, time of task, number of errors. Those are important keys to compare and identify the keys between two versions. So, make sure to keep in mind that we need some digital tools to measure the user’s interface. usertesting.com is a useful website where you could send an invitation to tester and measure the keys while doing testing. Also, Google analytics is useful to track a user’s clicking position. Or you can do a video call with Zoom — where the user is able to share the screen but you have to track the measurement by yourself.
After the final testing, I continue polishing the application one again to fix the found problems. As mentioned before, testing is the most important step during the development phase. Do not test only in the end when everything has been done, it might be too late. The earlier, the better.
Results
I am so happy to share my final design with everyone else.
I hope you enjoy this post and find some useful tips for yourself. Dont hesitate to change. You are not doing change alone. Let’s join the Hakage community to find a partner for your journey.
Thanks for reading!