Developing Soft Skills (sometimes called Life Skills) is a key ingredient to being a successful professional. Hard Skills are something that almost everyone learns at an academic level and it’s a person’s Soft Skills that help them stand out from the crowd. QDOOZ is a mobile app which helps users to develop their knowledge and abilities of Soft Skills and Qualities which help them achieve their goals more efficiently.
Agency: Product Side Contract | Client: QDOOZ | Involvement: Lead UI/UX | Visit: qdooz.com
At the end of the day, this is the simple thing to answer first. Creating User Personas based on initial research and assumptions about the product. What’s their name? How old are they? What is it they’re trying to achieve? These are the things we all ask ourselves first.
Once this is documented we work out a rough feature set for an MVP of the product. This is the minimal amount we need for a viable product to be launched.
Taking these features we proposed some user journeys for the product and explored different ways a user could navigate to their goal.
Once we’ve got those journeys and features for the various areas of the application we could start to have a look at what that might look like from a wireframe perspective.
We made 4 different journeys initially as we had various markets that were being proposed as the main target market. The shareholders wanted to see how this could manifest itself in the app and through exploring the wireframes we could begin to see which features worked strongest and how we could market those to various sectors.
We mapped these out using Sketch and InVision to make interactive prototypes which we could share with shareholders and the rest of the team to try and see what did and didn’t work.
Early on in the project we had pinpointed a possible market for the product that we wanted to heavily target. This involved professionals in various membership organisations that were required to do CPD (Continuing Professional Development), and how they needed to rack up a certain amount of “CPD points” over the course of a given year.
After discussions with various bodies, we were able to come to an agreement that the app could be used for accruing these points.
We quickly prototyped up journeys for these target markets using Sketch and InVision and used Lookback to capture invaluable user sessions with face to face subjects.
It was a case of test and iterate. 3 or 4 user sessions in the morning, followed by a team of 2 updating the wireframes and the prototype based on hunches and feedback we’d had in the sessions, ready for the next day for the next set of testers. It was invaluable feedback we were gaining from our test subjects.
This allowed us to narrow down the various prototypes into a single frictionless journey. A journey that we knew worked for the market we were after.
Once we had the structure, journey and the navigation methods all worked out it was a case of fleshing it out with UI. Working with another designer we nailed down a look and feel relatively quickly from a few different explored options and set about creating a design system that both was approachable and had integrity. After all this was to be used mainly by business professionals, but why can’t they have fun doing it?
We used various anonymous testing sites such as usertesting.com and usabilityhub.com to test out the initial branding and how it made users feel when interacting with the prototypes.
We actually revisited some of the test subjects which we used for the UX process to see if their concerns were corrected by the latest prototype and to see if the UI helped clarify any of their issues.
We found immediately that the feedback was very positive! The work had paid off and the journeys were very smooth alongside a brand which people found that they wanted to interact with.