Renáta-Adrienn Bajkó
My design process involves a deep dive into understanding the needs, goals, and preferences of the target audience. By empathising with users and aligning their requirements with business objectives, I strive to create intuitive and meaningful experiences that resonate with users on a deeper level.
Let's get started on this design journey together, explore the power of user-centered design, and the impact it can have on creating exceptional digital experiences.
The first and most important thing in the design process is to understand the purpose of the product and the people we’re designing it for through research and discovery. By taking the time to delve into the "why" of our project, we can gain a deeper understanding of what our users need and what objectives our product must meet to be successful.
When we define user needs and product objectives and use them as our project foundation, we can create experiences that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also effective, functional, while also meeting the needs of our target audience.
Understanding the target audience is crucial to creating meaningful and engaging experiences, and the user persona serves as an indispensable tool, empowering designers to gain a deep and comprehensive understanding of their users.
Personas are fictional representations of key user segments that embody their needs, goals, and behaviors. They act as archetypes, allowing us to empathize with our users and help us make more informed design decisions. We can go beyond a generic understanding of our audience and gain a comprehensive view of their motivations, pain points, and expectations.
We can make an educated assumption based on the nature of the app, the problem it solves, and the segmentation questions from the existing user onboarding process and identify remote workers as our primary target audience.
Potential Benefits of Time Tracking Apps Let’s think about why would anyone benefit from a time tracking app:
My favorite way to begin this process is to identify common pain points. This can help create personas that not only resonate with a broad audience, but also highlights specific user needs and goals.
What are the common pain points that the remote workers might have? What unique requirements and specific challenges do they potentially have?
We have already uncovered a few key user pain points. These insights will guide our design decisions and ensure that our solutions align with our users' expectations and aspirations.
Making Personas Feel More Human
In a real-world setting personas would be based on user research, including interviews, surveys, and observations, which provide rich data about users' context, pain points, desires, and habits.
The valuable information behind our persona lies in their motivations, needs, and goals. With this in mind, we can consciously choose to add some irrelevant details like their name, photo, occupation and education to the visual representation, so it looks more relatable and memorable.
In order to keep the project moving faster, I’ll create the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral segmentation details with chatGPT, using prompts that clearly explain who our persona is, what they’re struggling with, and what their desired future state is.
Here’s what I’ve come up with. Meet Maude.
Customer journey maps are an essential tool for gaining a deep understanding of the customer experience and creating a deliverable that everyone on the team can appreciate. By mapping out the journey, we can identify pain points and areas for improvement, and use this information to create an experience that exceeds customers' expectations.
We can track how our customer interacts with our app at every touchpoint and every stage. This allows us to pinpoint where customers may be encountering difficulties or frustrations and iterate accordingly.
Let’s think about the beginning and the end of the journey. What are the before & after states? Before they discover and after they start using the app?
Our desirable outcome is Maude feeling more productive, in control of their time, and achieving daily goals. On the flip-side, the undesirable outcome would be for Maude to continue feeling overwhelmed, miss deadlines, and not being able to accomplish everything they need to do in a day.
Even though we’re here to enhance the onboarding experience of our product, here I’ve illustrated the entire journey, from the initial discovery to the desired end goal. By mapping out the entire journey, we can identify key touchpoints and interactions, moments of friction that users may encounter during onboarding, and also opportunities to overcome these.
Looking at the customer journey map, we can recognize the significance of the first phases in setting the tone for the overall user experience. It is during these first phases that users form their initial impressions of the product.
The foundation for our design process was laid by thoroughly understanding the product, market, and target audience. Crafting a detailed persona and customer journey map allowed us to step into our users' shoes and uncover some valuable opportunities for improvement.
Stay tuned for the next part of the case study, where we will delve into ideas about how to address the issues and implement the opportunities identified in the Research and Discovery phase, define key onboarding elements, then get into the exciting parts of wireframing, prototyping, and bringing our ideas to life.