Week 15: Designing the Experience and Interactions
April 20 — April 26, 2020
<04/20 In class discussion>
The card sorting exercise for information architecture gave us a good productive start to this week. When we discussed it with Peter and Aadya in class, it helped us explain our vision with more clarity and brought up an important point about contextualizing our intervention as an app or a part of the settings. So far, we had proposed it under the privacy tab in Apple settings emphasizing that this should be an integral part of the iOS.
We debated the pros and cons of each, following are the highlights of major cons:
As a part of the settings: Our information architecture has been methodically derived based on user feedback for both content and arrangement. The way it stands, it has deeper menus that are more suited for an app. Pushing all this as a part of settings seems like an overkill and overwhelming. Additionally it does not align with Apple’s current principles of organizing actionable content.
As a stand alone app: The provider of the stand alone app has too much power when it has the ability to connect to all the other apps (since our intervention links the policy with all the apps on user’s device). Additionally, we believe that making our intervention as an integral feature of the ecosystem of a device would be more impactful than something that needs to be downloaded separately or can be removed from the device.
In order to develop a deeper understanding and make a decision, we spent some time analyzing what kind of functions and features are put under settings and which are Apple’s standard apps. Apple’s Health app was really helpful in this process, it has a stand alone app which cannot be deleted from the device and also a part of settings. Although the name ‘Health’ is as dull as it can be!
We observed that the key difference between app and settings is that the former covers actionable items as well as review, whereas the latter is all about all actionable items.
We have decided to do something similar, where in our intervention would be a standard Apple app that cannot be deleted form the device. It would have all the features that we are thinking of, including settings, but additionally some key settings and preferences would also be accessible from the settings of the device. This also means that we have a little more flexibility with UI design than it would have been for the settings menu.
<04/21 Devising strategy>
We knew we had to begin work on the UI of our app, but we wanted to be strategic about quantity and quality of what goes in our video. We made a list of all the features of our app that we would be good to highlight. We came up with a list of 7 features, from which we then shortlisted and prioritized. The idea was to be minimal, clear and do the video really well. In terms of UI, this helped us narrow down which elements of UI to design and which to put on the back burner unless needed. Each team member took ownership of at least one feature.
This list got further defined when we came together to discuss our idea. For example, for the feature with respect to review data footprint, we thought an effective way of showing it would be data crumbs falling down as a user walks while using a digital service on their device, instead of literally showing it in the UI in our video. This could be an opening to the video providing a telescopic view of the problem.
<04/22 In class discussion>
We had learnt from our last presentation that our storytelling was lacking. Our presentation was very clinical, dry and failed to connect with the audience. Reflecting on that experience, we all felt really strongly about doing the story telling aspect really well in this presentation. In order to achieve that, we decided that from this week onward, we’ll work on the presentation, the video and the UI simultaneously. Our strategy is to divide and conquer, achieving a balance between ur individual strengths and what we hope to learn. So we divided the work load as follows:
UI: Isha Hans, Jisoo Shon
Video Narrative: Jiyoung Ohn
Structure of the presentation: deepika Dixit
We shared our initial thoughts about presentation with Peter and Sofia during the class and they gave us great feedback. Some of the points that struck us are:
- Get the audience to care about this problem and set the stage. May be ask the audience, all of which is on Zoom to attend your presentation, if they have read Zoom’s privacy policy? Do they know about the privacy concern with it, and if so do they care to stop using it?
- What stories can you tell to to make this as a product pitch?
- How will your narrative weave in the human aspect?
- Do you guys want to add the next steps, with IoT and other devices in the future?
We resonated with the need to answer these questions and are working to weave these thoughts into out presentation and the video.
<04/25 Group discussion>
We came together to discuss the progress on the areas of work we have picked up. Doing the presentation, UI and video simultaneously has helped us refine our concept also in multiple ways. For example, the on-boarding has been a tricky part of our design, and getting down to actually what a user would see, what is actionable, what is an easy to understand language etc. has helped us make our idea robust and succinct.
We also debated over issues like whether the policy should be represented as a series if easy to understand questions, or in terms of the level of control over the data points that a user has chosen. We are yet to untangle some of these balls of confusion, but it has been productive and in line with our intent to make this product thorough and plausible.
<04/26 Wire-framing>
Having discussed first attempt of the UI, we worked on the first round of iteration. We are targeting to finish low fidelity UI by mid next week to jam on the high fidelity UI and micro-interactions.
This is it for this week, check out our next week’s blog here.
