Drilling Down on UX Design Details

I met D., my UX mentor, last Saturday afternoon for two hours in a coffee shop near his home. The pre-agreed purpose of the meeting was to introduce him to my senior project and walk him through my preliminary work on it.

He quickly grasped the project’s concept and purpose to enable caregivers to share proven recommendations and resources with each other. I had various documents on aspects of the project but not surprisingly, he was drawn to the visual materials. D. wanted to start with my personas. He said they were well thought out and looked professional. For future scenarios, he recommended breaking each into smaller chunks, which are easier for a UX designer to reference when developing wireframes.

I showed him process flow diagrams for the Q&A module user path and housing review user path. I also showed him the first wireframe for the Q&A screens.

He reviewed the user flow diagrams in detail and made several suggestions, including:

• Grouping ‘Yes’ options together and separate from ‘No’ options stemming from the same decision point
• Limiting rating scale options to three to avoid user fatigue
• Highlighting the most positive outcomes on the chart with a background tone or colour.
• Exploring design additions to offset the user’s disappointment in negative areas of the path, such as when they don’t find an immediate answer to their question.

For my wireframes, D suggested limiting horizontal buttons on mobile screens to three and to strive for more white space. He recommended Designing Social Interfaces, by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone, as a great reference for social solutions. This is particularly helpful as early on I searched for UX resources specific to social and came up dry.

My biggest challenge with senior project is time, as I thought we would have more time this semester to focus on development.  D. suggested shaving time by using Axure for the prototype instead of formatting it in a separate tool, as I’d initially planned.  He also recommended proposing varied stages for the solution to manage breadth of scope and avoid scope creep.

I’m now busy implementing D.’s recommendations, which means making some time-consuming structural adjustments to my user flows.

D. has agreed to meet me again but as his best time is weekends, we can’t meet again until April 11. This is two days before my senior project is due for my semester mark. However, as I’m looking at phases, I consider this the deadline for phase one. I can iterate further for phase two, which is when I will show it as part of a digital show’s student exhibit in early May.

I also heard back from M. with a date to meet with her and a content expert just after the semester deadline for senior project. However, I can apply any advice I glean from this meeting to phase two.

Caregiver Personas: Connecting Dedication with Digital

Unless an interactive solution meets a human need or desire, it’s just a surge of energy-sucking pixels. To prevent this, you need to start with personas. According to the UX Lady, personas “identify real users’ profiles’, needs, wants and expectations” and help us answer ‘what’ each would do when faced with decisions, both on and offline.

My senior project is to develop a niche, social media network to help informal or unpaid caregivers (i.e., people who are responsible for overseeing the care of family members or other loved ones), specifically those who care for senior citizens.

Many of these caregivers are 45 to 65 years-old and called the ‘sandwich generation’ because they’re raising their own children, while caring for elderly loved ones. According to studies, these caregivers make up a fifth of Canadian professionals and are often “short of sleep, grumpy….and take it out on customers and colleagues at work,” but they are more than this. They are diverse people, living multidimensional lives.

To find answers, I developed personas, based on composites of more than a dozen caregivers I know personally, plus many I’ve read or learned about through recent research and my communications work with Ontario’s Community Care Access Centres.

They included:

• Gillian,  the ‘Technopeasant on  a Mission,’ who is single, 61-years-old and responsible for her 92-year-old mom, who recently pulled a tendon.
• Bruce, the ‘Hipster Tree-Hugger,’  who is a 52-year-old teacher, married with kids, and cares for Mary, his 83-year-old mom, who still lives in her own home…but that is changing as her scenario unfolds.
• Nadira, the ‘Techno Diva,’ a 45-year-old, software executive, married with one child and caring for her elderly parents, who speak minimal English, including her 82-year-old father, who’s being tested for sleep apnea.

I built these personas using a hybrid mix of templates from the UX Lady, creative agency Fake Crow and our interactive media course last term. I also reviewed other personality models, such as Microsoft’s archetypes for cross-screen engagement, which I thought particularly relevant to tech savvy caregivers juggling home and work tasks; I thought how each type applied to caregivers I’ve met. From these resources, I identified, merged and created categories that touched on characteristics, such as their goals and frustrations, that can inform ‘how’ I build a social network to support their caregiving needs.

When I presented my personas for the class critique, much of the feedback centred on Gillian. I made her proficient at searching for answers online but lacking any kind of mobile phone.  My classmates thought it impossible that someone who was a senior’s lifeline wouldn’t have embraced the convenience of mobile. However, I based this persona on a real, digital immigrant who didn’t user computers until she was 32 and finds the consistent presence of devices, in boardrooms to diningrooms, offensive. Having heard similar objections from other Baby Boomers, I don’t think Gillian is an anomaly but I tweaked her persona to be more ‘open’ to mobile — someday.

Other suggestions were:

• Including less affluent, non-professional people
• Including a younger 20 to 30 something demographic as a secondary audience for cases when they are the only family nearby

I think including less affluent/non-professionals was the most important suggestion and adjusted my personas accordingly. I stayed with the ‘sandwich generation’s’ age range based on my research but will consider younger caregivers as a secondary audience for my overall solution.