Overview
For my Interaction Design I class my team of four other students spent three months creating the prototype, Pocket Genie, which is a car maintenance tracker to help users extend their car's life with the help of a calendar, notifications, guides for simple fixes, way to find affordable and best reviewed mechanics nearby, and other helpful features. Our main purpose was to target the younger generation users, like ourselves, that may not have enough knowledge of how to take care of their car and help them understand their own car but creating an experience custom to them. We were able to accomplish our final product utilizing the Goal-Directed Design process created by Alan Cooper. This process page will further explain the Goal-Directed Design steps we took to achieve our final prototype.
Duration: 3 Months
Role: UX Designer, Researcher
Meet The Team
Goal-Directed Design
Goal Directed Design is a methodology by Alan Cooper which focuses on user behavior and meeting user needs and goals. This multi-stage process consisted of research, modeling, requirements, framework, and refinement.
Research Phase
The Research Phase is where the IXD Designer learns the context of what they are trying to design. In other words, this is the phase where we focus on mostly qualitative research and some of quantitative research to better understand our domain and users.
In Goal Directed Design, the research phase gives detailed knowledge of the users designers are designing for, figure out the problem constraints, and the business goals that drive the design. This phase gives the product a higher chance to be successful.
Kickoff Meeting
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, our team was limited to holding our meeting online, so instead we utilized Miro, a collaborative whiteboard where we can all share and edit our work, and held a virtual meeting via Discord.
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While completing the Kickoff Meeting worksheet, my team and I were able to come to a conclusion that the auto maintenance app industry has focused primarily on features and not on their interface which fails to appeal to younger audiences: Millennials and Generation Z.
Problem statement: The current state of the auto maintenance app industry has focused primarily on features and not enough on their interface. What existing products/service will address this gap by creating an interface that will welcome all age groups
User goals: The promise of an easy experience that will save you money and prolong the life of your car and making Gen Z and Millennials feel like it is cool to learn more about caring for their cars.
Literature Review
Literature reviews are when a design team review any documents relating to the product being designed and its domain. This is important in Goal-Directed Design because it allows us develop questions to ask stakeholders and SMEs and provides us with additional knowledge against user data.
After our team completed the literature review, our overall research had shown evidence that Gen Zs do not know how to perform basic car maintenance tasks, experience more car related issues, and face more financial issues relating to their cars.
Competitive Audit
In Goal-Directed Design, the competitive audit gives designers a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of currently available products.
What my team discovered was that a lot of apps have a feature to track your car refueling and provide maintenance trips except for CARFAX.
Competitive Audit
Stakeholder Interviews
Due to COVID-19, our team was not able to conduct this meeting, but instead we filled out a Kickoff meeting worksheet on Miro board instead to help us think from a stakeholder's perspective. In Goal-Directed Design, stakeholder interviews help us understand that business and technical context of the product. In our case, we were able to make assumptions of what will cause our business to fail:
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Assumptions that Gen Z/millennials don't know much about cars and have a hard time understanding/keeping track of their car maintenance.
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Another takeaway from this worksheet is that we can make money from high-rated auto shops that advertise their deals on items the user might be looking for through our app, how we can acquire the majority of our customers by using various social media platforms, and how we can appeal to the younger generation with our user-friendly design which can help us beat our primary competition.
User Observations/Interviews
User interviews are important in Goal-Directed Design because it gives the designer a better understanding of potential users to ensure that the application is well designed for them. Understanding user behavior is important because it helps designers uncover the design implications.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, our team held user interview via Discord with other classmates from different teams in our Interaction Design 1 class. My team and I interviewed five people, each taking turns moderating. The moderator would usually ask a list of questions we already had ready before the interview which consisted of basic questions such as their name or age and other questions relating to how they take care of their car. After the moderator was done asking the main questions, the rest of the team would then jump in and ask additional questions that they may have come up with while listening in on the interview. We were able to get different age ranges with our youngest interviewee being 20 years old to our oldest interviewee being 30 years old. This helped us prove our findings in our literature review about how the younger generation struggles more with car maintenance than the older generation.
After we completed our interviews, we completed an Affinity Map, which is a technique where designer separately create affinities (sticky notes) of what they observed, and then later come together and group the affinities which are similar.
My team and I used an affinity map for all five interviewees with us each using a different color sticky note and then meeting virtually via discord grouping the ones which are similar.
Modeling Phase
During the modeling phase in the Goal Directed Design process, designers create personas, which are characters based on the research phase. A persona is a powerful tool for interaction design because it provides a precise way of thinking and communicating about how users have, think, what they want to accomplish, and why. Personas help us understand how a user might interact with our app which allows us to move forward with the process.
Primary Persona
Our primary persona is Josephine Pines, a 24 year old college student who utilizes her cheap pre-owned car for transportation. Because of her lack of knowledge of cars, she worries her car will breakdown.
Our secondary persona is Wesley Smith, a 21 year old with a 2013 Honda Accord and has basic car maintenance knowledge. Wesley focuses on learning more about car maintenance so he can fix anything by himself and teach his future kids.
Secondary Persona
During our persona writing meeting we came up with two scenarios. One scenario being a typical college student who works part-time and has no knowledge about car maintenance and the other being someone who doesn't work but has basic knowledge about car maintenece. Both personas helped us determine what can work for different users whether they are beginner or intermediate.
Requirements Phase
The requirements phase in the Goal Directed Design process is where we create the requirements list based on the personas from the modeling phase and what information and capabilities are required to accomplish their goals. During this phase we also create a context scenerio which is written from the personas perspective which allows the designer to imagine the ideal user experience.
During our requirements phase meeting, we set a timer and each created our own list of requirements for our app. Then, we came together and listed our requirements from most important to least important. We ended up with a list for our primary and secondary persona and a separate list for the general users.
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Next, we created a context scenario of our primary persona, Josephine Pines, but putting her in a situation of when and how she would use the app. Putting our persona is a made up scenario gave our team an idea of how a typical user might interact with the app and how it fits into our targeted users which are intermediate/beginner users.
Requirements List
Context Scenario
Frameworks Phase
After finishing the requirements phase, my team and I created wireframes for our prototype based off of the context scenario and requirements list we made using our personas from the modeling phase.
Creating a wireframe in the Goal-Directed Design process are a highly effective way to discuss design solutions. Due to COVID-19, my team and I worked on our wireframes separately on Miro and later came together via Discord to connect our frames all together. My responsibility was to come up with the calendar screens wire frame and car tutorials screens.
Usability Testing
After our team leader, Rocio, created the final prototype, we virtually held a user test via discord to receive feedback to find ways to make our prototype better. User testing is important in the Goal-Directed Design process because it puts the whole process to the test to see if all of the research, modeling, requirements, and frameworks phases worked to satisfy the user goals.
Feedback received:
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Add a submit button
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Add mechanic addresses
Conclusion
The Goal-Directed Design approach helped our team figure out what exactly we would need to do to accomplish our user needs and goals. Due to COVID-19 , it definitely did challenge us sometimes when we weren't able to hold face-to-face meetings or interviews. Another challenge due to COVID-19 and everything being virtual this semester was time management. We found it challenging trying to hold meetings that fit to everyone's schedules, but we were able to divide up the work and get everything done within the timeframe. I think next time we can work better on planning out when to hold our user interviews/testing so that everyone on the team can be present and learn.
My main takeaway from this project would be that after doing all of the research, especially during the research phase, I was able to understand how the Goal Directed Design process helps focus on user goals and needs.