Outdoor | Sports | Food | Health
Planning an outdoor adventure- but unsure what destination/route to pick?
Preparing for your first ironmen but need some advice which cloth to choose?
Want to eat healthier and need a nutrition expert?
01 - Project Overview
Role
UX Designer
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Duration
February- June 2021
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Background
Morii- offers the opportunity to contact 80 handpicked experts in the field of Outdoors, Sports, Food, and Health.
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Tools
Adobe XD, Balsamiq, Typeform
Problem
Users need a way to get quality, quick advise in this field of interest because they are looking for experts who had the same experience and can help with direct advise.
Overview
Morii is my own app, which I designed during my UX Design Course with CareerFoundry. The idea was to bring my love for Outdoor, Sports, Food and Health together and create an app that gives users the opportunity to obtain personal advice from experts, tailored to their specific needs.
Goal
Our App is intended to attract users in a growing market. Since the onset of Covid19, there has been a high increase in sales for products and services worldwide, in the fields of Outdoors, Sports, Food and Health. This is a consequence of the fact that people are now more likely to
spend their free time outside in nature, engaging in sports, developing healthy habits, or trying out new recipes.
Advancements in digitalization have enabled users to access and provide information online, in an impersonalized manner. In addition, people like to connect with other like-minded people and are willing to pay for quality service. Our app is intended to help them get answers to their questions easily and without hassle. Key to this app, which is tailor-made to serve each user’s specific needs, is its design, which is at the focus of my work.
02 - Design Thinking Process
Challenge
Over five months and 500 intensive hours, I utilized the design thinking methodology to create my own app from scratch.
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The first challenge I had to address was: what was the type of app that I wanted to create? A requirement of this challenge was that the app had to be a platform that connects people to experts, or an “expert app”. What excited me, however, was that I had complete freedom to select the domains of expertise! That, in particular, sparked my creativity!
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03 - Empathise
Competitor Analyse
I conducted market research through competitive analysis, for which I specifically selected two indirect competitors: Kry and Justanswer. I conducted SWOT and UX analyses on them to gain a deeper understanding of the design patterns, heuristics and to help identify potential areas for innovation through design.
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Being an Outdoor | Sports | Food and Health enthusiastic person myself: why might that be relevant?
As an outdoorsy person, I love good food and to lead a healthy lifestyle. I already possess a decent amount of knowledge on where to find advice, when I am planning an outdoor trip, need some help with exercising techniques or want new recipes. Most of the time, the answer has simply been googling, surfing through blogs or Facebook groups. But so far – I have found no website or app developed by any competitor, which offers services from experts in these fields.
Even if the content in competitors’ apps was different, I was able to acquire valuable insights on how to structure and create an expert app that users would love to keep coming back to. Understanding the weaknesses in those apps was also essential to me knowing what I would do better in the design of my own app.
User Research
I conducted both qualitative and quantitative research. The primary goal of my research was to gain insight into the journey of a user, when seeking expert advice, as well as potential pain points and desires. The purpose of doing this was to better identify important feature requirements of potential users. I found it easy to find test participants, as I love to get in contact with people even in general. What I found challenging, was to stick to a certain amount of time to do this.
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Target Audience
As the app is about Outdoor | Sports | Food | Health, I chose participants who are passionate about at least one of those fields.
Analysis
I analysed the data that I had collected from user interviews and surveys, and later synthesised them into key findings. I then grouped these findings into an affinity mapping, which was helpful to create subtopics and to gain insights into what those features are, that are important to our users. With the help of these insights, I started creating user personas, user journeys and flows.
04 - Define
User Personas
I used the findings from my user research to create two primary user personas: Sina and Andy. Displaying their motivations, needs, frustrations and key information helped me to visualize the kind of users that the app should attract. I always took these personas into consideration in making further design decisions.
As my app attracts multiple kinds of users, I also wanted to ensure that my main user personas reflect their varying needs as well. Sina represents the outdoorsy sportive person who wants to get new ideas for an upcoming outdoor trip. Andy, on the other hand represents a young professional, who wants to use Morii for educational reasons. He needs an expert to learn more about Peruvian flavours, as he has to organize an event centered around Peru at his job.
05 - Ideate
User Journeys
To help me ideate, I then created user journeys. And by mapping these journeys, I gained a deeper understanding of their emotional states, when seeking advice from an expert in their field of choice. This information served as a valuable asset to me, in identifying key features that the application should possess.
User Flows
A visual portrayal of all the individual steps that a user, i.e., our user persona, has to take, in order to accomplish a specific task within the app helped me, as the designer, to focus on all essential screens that have to be designed for the app. Similarly, thinking of all the tasks that the user will have to / want to accomplish using the app, helped me to showcase all screens that have to be designed.
Information Architecture
Having conducted a user research, I was excited to bring the app to life! To organize the content in my app, I started writing down sites and sub-sites. To ensure that my structure is clear, I conducted a card sorting test. The open card sorting helped me to understand the categories under which users placed specific screens.
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Sitemap
During the sitemap creation I often thought, "What step does the user need to take next?" – this in turn helped me to show each essential screen at the next step. The sitemap organizes the content and shows the connection and hierarchy of the screens. Like an architect, I as a UX Designer know that a sitemap is the framework to my app; it thus needs to be stable and well thought-out. The sitemap underwent a couple of iterations throughout this process.
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Search Feature
Book Feature
Expert Profile
06 - Wireframing & Prototyping
I started sketching my first wireframes with pen and paper before progressing to mid and high fidelity. It felt great to see my ideas progressing forward!
Besides the app’s main features which are Onboarding, Log In, Sign Up and Homescreen, I found out, through the ideation process, that Search, Contact, Book and Review an Expert are its most important features. Those features represent the core values of Morii, as the most frequent touchpoints between the user and the app are here. I thus proceeded to focus next on their creation.
07 - Testing
Usability Testing
With a clickable prototype in my hand, my next step was to perform usability tests. The Goal of this testing was to find major issues in the features of the app. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these were remote moderated tests.
Preparing test scripts, finding test subjects, moderating tests, and evaluating test results meant that I had a lot to do on my table. I directed my focus towards carrying out these activities one after another and was subsequently able to handoff my findings after one week. During the test, I assigned situational tasks to users and observed their behaviour. I assessed errors using the Jakob Nielson scale.
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Results
The testing process itself was very exciting to me - I received a lot of constructive criticism surrounding the app, which is the best form of criticism one can get, as without critique there would be no opportunity for growth. Furthermore, I found out that users struggled to end a task – either because the function was misleading or because it was unclear. Also, the amount of time a user spent on a screen helped me to find out if the design is straightforward or not.
To group my observations, I used affinity mapping again. I paired this with a rainbow spreadsheet to document the frequency and severity of errors, along with common usability issues.
Findings
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Users found the questionnaire sometimes hard to understand; it took them too long to complete it
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Expected categories to choose in the search feature
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Found the payment screen unappealing
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Found the wording in the onboarding screen misleading
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Asked what Morii means, they found it appealing
Iterate
Based on the Findings I started to iterate the design. The rainbow spreadsheet shows all user comments and ratings on first hand, that helped to focus on the major issues.
08 - Style Guide
Refining the Design
In this fun part I polished the design in different aspects! On the one hand I iterated the design after Material Design Guidelines and on the other hand I created a design language template, showing off all stylistics used in the app. Besides these, I learned HTML at a basic level, and used accessibility and ethics guidelines to create an inclusive design.
Style
The styling and branding of Morii represents a young, smart, and professional aesthetic. Style is a symbiosis of bringing business requirements and users’ needs together. Both have to be combined to create a great product!
09 - Final Product
Problem solved?
My original intention was to design an app that is new to the market. Something currently does not exist as an expert app, at least for the fields of expertise that I chose. My biggest challenge was to create an app, in which users would be willing to pay for the services that it offers. Through my Interviews and surveys, I discovered that almost 90% never pay for expert advice. As the internet offers so many options for getting free advice, such as Youtube, Facebook Groups, Instagram, and various other forums, I had to create a tool which offers value.
To fulfil this need, I designed features as the "Free Daily Expert Sessions" and formulated a business strategy. Each day, a user will see on the home screen, an expert session that is free of charge. On one day, it could be a session on "How to pack lightweight", and on another, it could be on "How to create positive beliefs". The key to success here, is to create free-of-charge tools which will make the user want to use the app more often and share it with friends, taking advantage of network effects. Such tools will make it more likely that the app will pop up first in users’ minds, whenever they want to talk to experts.
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As a result, I am quite proud of Morii. The name Morii is Romanian and means "to capture a fleeting moment". I love the fact that the name means something so poignant, because to me, being outdoors or enjoying sports, good food and so on, is always about capturing moments and creating experiences.
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Curious? Check out my current Prototype or Video Presentation.
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What I have learned
There is so much to mention, however my most significant learning so far is that UX Design is a never-ending process. We are all users and undergo varying experiences with products and services, in all kinds of situations in life. Which is great!
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What this means is that there is always an opportunity to apply the design thinking process to improve those experiences. So that we create better products. But for whom?
Yes! You are right.
We create better products for the people who use them! People are the key.
Finally, it is never about what I think – it is about what the user thinks, wants and needs. Therefore, as UX designers, we know that there is always room to improve upon a design. The key to success, therefore, is to keep testing and iterating.
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What comes next
Before I started the course, I had no previous experience in UX Design. What I knew is that I am a person who excels at self-organization and time management. Someone with a growth mindset and is always eager to learn. Someone who loves to do creative work and be part of an international work environment.
Within these intense five months, I found out that those soft skills that I had extensively trained in previous stations in my career were really important.
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Moving forward, I would like to carry out more projects, in which I can improve my design and software tool skills. Specifically, I would love to learn more Adobe Photoshop to create better visual illustrations and brand identities myself.
10 - Retrospective
Expert Page
This page is the heart of the app. It contains a lot information and engaging features!
Goal: Appealing Expert Page, Informativ, Professional - makes the user book a call!
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Explore the App Features
Discover Page
Three search options. Engage users to explore all functionalities of the app.
Goal: Create a clear, modern, effective search engine, helping the user to get directly to the information needed!
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Homepage
Algorithm shows popular and upcoming experts, sparks users' interest.
Goal: Make the user a fan of the app, make the user use the app more frequently, engage to share cool experts with others, save them.
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Homepage
Daily Expert Session, is one key functionality of the app. The user sees everyday a new topic and a new expert who leads the session. It's for all users free to join.
Goal: Give the user a taste of what the app is about, spark interest to try more, share with friends, create brand awareness, motivate user to book a expert call or try a subscription type.
Increase app downloads, app awareness, strengthen customer relationship, increasing sales.
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