In Case You Missed It
ICYMI was a school assignment. More than that, it was my first complete UX project ever.
Like some very wise bears from my youth taught me, sometimes the best way to learn is by learning all the things you should not do. For better or worse, this was one of those projects. And while learning like this can be painful and challenging, it’s an excellent experience, chock full of lessons that will stick with me forever.
Now, if you’re into flaming dumpsters or train wrecks, read on.
My roles throughout this project:
Product strategy
User research & Analysis
Persona creation
MVP definition
Wireframes
UI Design & Prototyping
Usability Testing
The Brief
What it started as
Zeit is a subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin empire. After a long struggle with Elon Musk, Virgin has been able to make time travel tourism available to all. Zeit is looking at you to create their new brand, and set up an ecommerce responsive website in which they can sell travel packages to different times.
What it ended up as
ICYMI is a site for customers to book travel to past concerts and festivals.
First come the lessons, then the fun - Research
Market research
I did a bit of market research, which, as you might imagine, did not turn up much in the field of time travel. I looked mainly at travel sites, particularly those that offered package deals or “adventures”. This was still while I was mainly focused on looking at time travel as just another kind of travel people would be lining up for, as well as being focused on the how of booking more than the overall experience of this fictional reality.
Interviews
Giddy with the kind of excitement that belongs to the blissfully unaware, I lined up 5 interviewees and put together a list of questions that I was sure were so cleverly crafted, so deliciously deep, that my only result could be golden nuggets of insight.
The problem is that I began with some assumptions. And while that is not unexpected, the trouble was with the assumptions I didn’t know I had made until much later. After my interviews, I was left with a lot of the answers I set out looking for, and not the gold ingots I thought I was panning for. You know what they say about making assumptions…
That was a very good lesson for me - Ideation/Re-framing
Persona
I should be honest here. I re-engineered this persona a number of times throughout this process. Which I only point out to emphasize how often my focus shifted in the early stages. Looking back, the issue was that I hadn’t quite nailed what problem I was trying to solve. My mentor urged me to use the Jobs to be Done framework, but it would be a bit before I truly wrapped my head around it. This version of the persona was the last and the one I would use until the end.
Ideation
Around this time, I got overwhelmed with useless information, I mean, so many great and valuable lessons, while trying to come up with visual and mental models, and diving too deep into the complex information hierarchy of a time travel site that could send people anywhere in the past.
So I narrowed my scope.
If I could go anywhere in time, I’d go to Woodstock. The real one, not that 90’s one. Then I remembered one of my interviewees mentioned that she wanted to go to concerts in her own lifetime that she had missed. Insights! My new concept was born.
Why don’t you let me ride it now? - Prototyping
Wireframing
If it looks like I skipped wire framing, that would be half right. At the urging of my mentor, I started into mid-fidelity prototyping after a round of some quick wireframes. Using images definitely helped me express my ideas quickly and easily.
From there, I moved to more high fidelity prototypes after getting some feedback from both my mentor and a group critique.
Task failed successfully - Testing
It was here that my giddy excitement returned; it was time to test my baby, my special site. I lined up 4 participants in person, set up to record their reactions while I watched the screen and took my own notes.
The first dent in my happy armor was from my prototype not displaying correctly on the laptop I was using, which obscured some of my design elements. I didn’t test it myself first, so that one is on me.
Every test went great, if I do say so myself, which I do. The results, on the other hand, not so much. My site suffered from being unclear, slightly difficult to navigate, and generally unsuccessful.
And yet, I was ecstatic.
I had built something. I had let it out of my hands, and put it in the hands of actual users. It wasn’t my baby anymore. It was a product that I was seeing with fresh eyes, and it needed fixing. It was quite liberating.
Coming back around - Branding and UI
I had skipped over branding in order to test my site, since logos don’t have much effect on how a site works, but I did pick up some lessons here. I had some ideas on what the branding would look like, but they weren’t clear enough to drive my design decisions. My placeholder logos didn’t do much for me and I think I got lax in keeping the design consistent and tight.
So while I synthesized my test results, I sketched out some logo designs. Once again, after skewing into complication, simplicity won the day - the rewind symbol. This clarity of vision helped me a lot as I moved through the rest of the project.
Bringing it all together - Final prototype
After adding in the logos and the UI, I focused on what I felt were the most important revisions to the site. This including a new landing page, revised trip detail pages, and a new confirmation page. I used more design patterns to increase the amount of consistency across the site.
In an ideal world, I would’ve tested another round to see if my revisions were successful, but I unfortunately was out of time.
Reflection
This project was difficult, frustrating, and, in short, a real grind. That said, it was a crash course in the truest sense, in which I learned a ton and found the overall effect to be incredibly rewarding. I learned how insidious assumptions can be, and how they can weave throughout your entire process without you even knowing. I learned how important it is to ask as many questions as you can think of in the beginning, in order to find the kinds of insights that can lead to truly innovative solutions. I experienced first-hand how overwhelming research can be without a clear goal and a specific problem to solve.
I learned how to be a designer. Now I just have to get good at it.