Serw.se
A project to provide Serw.se with user research and usability testing to help them reach their goal of that: "No senior should have to be alone unless they want to."
Overview & context
This was an educational project that I worked on as part of a “User research, Service design and Usability testing” course at Stockholms Tekniska Institut. This was the first time that we got to work with real clients. The project lasted from December 2020 until March 2021.
Serw is a company that is working to reduce involuntary loneliness among seniors. They are offering all kinds of events in association with different companies. They have a desktop site that is under construction and a poorly optimized mobile version of the site. As of today, Serw has to restructure their business plan and come up with new, digital solutions for seniors to meet.
The initial mission of my team was to examine the needs of their target audience and to come up with digital services that could satisfy them.
Stakeholders
Serw
High level time
11 weeks
Key goal
Help examine target audience needs.
Find possibilities for new, more digitalized services.
The Team
The team consisted of me and five other students. Everyone had to take responsibility for contributing to the team.
I contributed by sharing my knowledge in Figma to help others learn and develop new skills. I also used my ability to come up with valuable ideas to discuss and iterate to bring the project forward. What made the team great was that we had good communication throughout the process. We were all open-minded and gave everyone the chance to speak before making any major decisions. I believe these two things make the key to good cooperation and we managed that very well in this team.
The Challenge
Our goal for this project was to examine the target audience and come up with a service that could respond to their needs. As part of the course, we worked accordingly to the five stages of Design thinking (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, test.) to explore new innovative ideas that could be tested.
Since our target audience was seniors we chose to put much weight into accessibility and reaching WCAG-standards.
A major challenge was that due to Covid-19 our team could not meet up with someone from our target audience in person. This forced us into making a digital target group analysis even though our target group has a lack of digital experience. I believe this may have affected the end result of our user research because those specific seniors that are rarely online probably missed out on our survey that we later sent out. This also had us spending a lot of time phrasing our questions well to make sure they were easy to understand. Other than that I don’t think it affected the project too much.
Understanding the user
As a start of the process, we created a survey that included questions about our target audience's digital habits, their view on meeting new people and socializing.
We got permission from our customer to send it to all existing users on their platform. After it had been sent we received 194 answers out of 1178 people. We chose this specific method of gathering user insights because we felt it would give us a wide holistic perspective of our target audience and their frustrations. Some key results after gathering all answers was that:
- Our target audience had a relatively good digital habit and a positive view of it.
- The majority of users wanted to expand their social contacts.
- Their attitude towards trying out new digital services was not that positive in which we thought could be an outcome of lack of experience.
With this information we created a persona, problem statement and a user journey.
Persona
User journey
Problem statement
Synthesizing the material
Now that we had gone through both the empathize and define part of the design thinking process, we had a brainstorming session with card-sorting.
This generated ideas which led to then creating an effect-map and a "how might we" question. We used these methods to help create a common view on our goals and also which path we should take to get there.
Card-sorting
Effect-map
How might we?
Ideating solutions
When we came to the ideate phase we created a sort of mind map around the "How might we" question to concretize our generated ideas.
After some more analyzing and discussion we came up with the solution we decided to go for. We decided to focus on creating a forum for our users to talk, socialize, discuss and ask questions about whichever topic they feel like.
Validating design concepts
We used a lot of the data from our survey to be able to validate our newly created concept.
One particularly interesting finding in this stage of the process was that the majority of our users were very comfortable with Facebook and its UI which gave us ideas of which way to head for.
One of our first layouts of a specific section
Low-Fi prototypes
The knowledge that our users were comfortable with Facebook led us to create some simple desktop wireframes of what a forum could look like, with many elements being similar to Facebook.
Personally, I spent a lot of my spare time creating these wireframes both to help my team in this time pressured phase but also to develop my skills in Figma.
Testing Lo-Fi prototypes with users
With our first wireframes being in progress we created a couple of questions and tasks for our wireframes as part of a guerrilla testing. Each person in the team performed the test on someone they knew were similar to our targeted group. We did the tests through Figma, both in person and via zoom.
Due to the pandemic I let one of my family members try out our prototypes. I know this is not optimal because they might not be honest while answering questions because they care about me and my feelings which could affect the result negatively. One positive thing was that she resembled our target audience very well and the test got me some valuable insights to bring to the rest of the team.
Even though we were able to collect feedback and results from the tests pretty well. I think we could have done it more efficiently by grouping up while doing the tests to have one person interview, one person take notes, and if possible one person to observe instead of everyone doing it by themselves. But that is a lesson learned until next time!
Wireframes
Hi-Fi prototype development
At this stage, we contacted our client to ask if he had data on how many of the users use their phone to browse the site (a step I believe we should have done way earlier but didn't really think of at that time). He was quickly able to provide us with that specific data and we found that more than half of all the users visit the website via their phone.
With this insight in mind, we decided to rethink and create new wireframes with a mobile-first design. And when creating this new prototype we also made use of the results from the guerrilla testings that we did earlier.
I got to develop my skills in Figma while at the same time having a great feeling that I’m providing valuable content to our client. It was a very fun part of the process.
When we felt as done as we could be at that point, we did some usability tests with the same method as mentioned before. But this time our test-persons were very satisfied with the prototype and had little to remark on.
Results & impacts
After getting the last feedback from the usability tests we made some very slight changes to the prototype before feeling we were done.
The very last thing we did was to put together a design document for our customer including a detailed view of our process, results and recommended measures. We arranged a meeting with our customer to show him our last deliveries and he was very satisfied with all of our work and was very joyful.
He especially enjoyed the way we had made the survey and gathered results and said that that information could be valuable for a long time ahead. He was also very impressed by our prototypes and felt that it really could be something to consider building in the near future.
For me, that was such a great feeling to be able to deliver valuable content to our client.
Major learnings or points we wanted to call out
Research, Research, Research.
I have learned about the importance of proper research and how much easier the work gets after doing so.
Teamwork makes dreamwork!
Good teamwork is key to making a good project. Everyone in my team had a great ability to listen to each other, come up with ideas and discuss which made the process both fun and effective.
Kill your darlings.
To let go of what you think is a great idea can many times be the best thing you can do to be able to create an even better.
Time management.
With every delivery we did being under the constant pressure of weekly and monthly deadlines, I realized the importance of structuring your work to make it more effective.
Keep iterating.
To always keep on iterating brings your project forward in one way or another.
Think through the eyes of the users.
When trying to empathize and think from our users perspective many great ideas and solutions are born. A really important thing that gave me many good ideas.
Lessons learned & going forward
This project gave me a great overview of what a real project with a customer could be like. After the project was done, I realized how much I had learned about UX in general and how fun I thought it was.
I have gotten a good understanding of the Design Thinking process and how to work accordingly to it. I have developed skills such as interview techniques, prototyping, creating personas, moodboards, effect-maps and understanding the concept and weight of thinking about accessibility in an early stage.
The importance of regular communication with the customer is very major to make sure you are working towards the customer’s demands. I believe that this is a thing we could have done better during this project. We should have talked more to our client than we did. Especially since our client was very easily accessible and open to give us feedback at all times.
I have developed as a UX designer with this project and I am very excited for upcoming projects and collaborations.