TAJA EMMANUS
Learning from potential Users
A fresh pair of eyes on a project is important for engaging with the flaws of your designs and looking for ways to improve. Testing with users who would benefit from the site was useful and made me realize how my designs could benefit from following trends of similar sights for an intuitive experience. With this said, some adjustments could be made to make the sight a more unique experience.
"I wish I could filter by skill level"
"I find it pretty annoying when I have to pause a tutorial to take notes in order or the catch up to where they are while I'm working."
"It reminds me a lot of YouTube, that sems a little weird but I guess it makes it easier to find everything I need. But why not just use Youtube then?"
"I wonder where the logo"
A Graphic Design student
who needs an organized tutorial library
because “It’s hard to find things at your skill level and realize you should’ve learned something earlier too.”
Azelea Brown
An industry professional 3D modeler who is always happy to learn, wanting to find easy resources all on one site for the various programs they use for their work..
Connor Kurphsten
A 50-year-old animator interested in improving their animation skills for their videos. They considers themself a hobbyist and wants to create purely because they can but are always looking for good resources.
Henrietta Langely
Creating User Journey
I wanted the user journey to be relatively simple, which relied heavily on borrowing design trends seen in other platforms in order to make the experience more intuitive. The filtering system is intended to allow for easy browsing so users can find what they're looking for with just the click of a button and can be saved to be watched later for their convenience.
Iterating on designs
Reworking a product is never easy, to go through and redraft work over and over can be tiresome. But when the user is happy and you can feel the ease of the flow when they describe the experience, it brings a sense of satisfaction with your work.
FEATURE CREEP BALANCE
Understanding when to take notes from other sites with shared goals and audiences and when to learn to abstain from adding a feature that doesn't enhance the experience for the needs of our users was a balancing act.
OVERLY SIMPLE
When looking back at lo-fi phase of the project, it was clear to see the designs were simple to illustrate the basic layout. Yet when taking those and trying to format them properly, it was clear to see how certain specifications weren't taken into consideration such as video titles, instructor icons, and topic filterings so that users can see what the tutorial they're looking for falls under.
Imbalanced menu
Taking a quick glance at the menus shows that forethought in balance wasn't taken into account properly, putting more attention on the right half of the screen. While this doesn't negatively affect the website on the base level, it is the kind of thing that could bother a user subconsciously.
SPECIFICITY
Relating to the point of being overly simple in the lo-fi phase of the project, sections were oversimplified to a point that it cause users to be confused. In not being specific enough for basic details, whether not adding lines to represent text or circles for icons, users felt they were grasping at straws. Correcting this and creating a comfortable composition for what the users would interact with took longer than would be ideal.
TREATING ACCESSIBILITY AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT
Accessibility in design is as important to the user as the design itself. For many, it may be the only way to interact with a product due to the user's needs. In making accessibility an afterthought (having so few features to assist users with specific needs) I would isolate users from having access to the resource this site would work to provide. In the future, I want to make accessibility a better forethought and provide users with special needs with the dignity they deserve when navigating with our products.
WEBSITE VS APP
While graceful degradation was a new concept in the making of this project, I felt stuck at certain parts of the project. While the phone prototype remains in lo-fi quality, I found it difficult to transfer those designs to their hi-fi format by how jarring the difference in lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes for the desktop turned out. This point could be improved on with time and practice, but it should never be forgotten how changing the design between prototype stages can put a halt to an entire production simply by not keeping things consistent across platforms.
Takeaways
I learned quite a bit from this project, including my process, learning what things I should look out for, as well as how I can improve my workflow for the future.
Conclusion
This design required more planning on my part that I'm willing to do in the future, and plan on revising my designs with what I learned from this experience in mind. But regardless of the result, I'm proud of the work I put into this to learn and am excited to learn more in the future.