Working on a UX design project in lockdown - part 1

— 7 minute read

Cycling in the Yorkshire Wolds

For the last few years I've had a project I've been wanting to get stuck into to do with cycling in York and I've recently had some time to finally get onto it properly.

I have been slowly training on UX for the last year or two through reading and various courses to add another branch to my design skills. I've worked on aspects of UX before having worked in personas and shopper paths for ecommerce sites, designing interactive pdfs for onboarding and line managing websites but not something from soup to nuts. This is the project that I'm aiming to do the whole thing in and see what I get out of it.

HOWEVER there is one big unavoidable aspect in that I'm doing this in the middle of a virus pandemic which certainly puts a crimp on things. I don't think it will restrict me too much but I might struggle to do face to face testing and some other aspects - we'll see how it goes.

Starter resources

In no particular order, these resources are what have helped me so far:

My objective

My project is aimed at people wanting to go cycling in York. Seems simple enough - there's plenty of sites that cater to cyclists in the York area but:

  • there's lots that are just listicles that rattle off loads of locations for the sake of it
  • a lot of sites show starting locations that you'd actually need to drive for a few hours to get to and aren't shown in relation to somewhere else
  • they show the routes but not things you can see along the way

My aim is that this site should help different types of riders find a ride that's got something for them and start and finish in York. Despite what the bellends on the York Press comments think, York is a pretty cycle friendly already with Sustrans routes and cycle paths through town. It's a small city surrounded by miles of pleasant countryside which has lots of different terrain and areas depending on what you want out of your ride.

Research

For my initial research I set up a group of friends a task to record themselves doing a task of "Find a bike route in York that you would like to do" and gave them a time limit of half an hour. I then gave them a scenario that was slightly more specific to them like "you're looking for a ride for a group of friends" or "you want a ride to do with family". If they wanted they could expand on that scenario further so we could see what avenues they went down. I've got a fairly broad group of people: some local, others tourists and different skill levels and interests. The recordings were spread over the space of a week or two as people did it in their spare time. I didn't have the option of watching people first hand so videos were the next best thing.

For recording we used a mixture of OBS, Quicktime, Xplit and I think someone even used the Windows Gaming bar. There was only one recording that I completely wrote off - my brother trying to do it on his iphone which had a complete meltdown so we just ended up with a herky jerky video of him sighing.

After I annotated the recordings I started on an empathy map. The only sticky notes I have in the house are years old and the stick has given up on them. Rather than just plastering my wall with Blutak I ended up building the map in Miro here which is just as well as it ended up being massive. I got a huge amount of information out of the videos and even whittling down some of the duplicated comments I reckon I only used a third of what I got on the map.

Empathy map

"I just want a map, all I want is a map."

I grouped all the comments on the empathy map from left to right with a general search working towards a more refined final goal of finding a ride.

Next to the empathy map I've then whittled down 5-10 pain points from high to low, linked them to Goals [Benefits users get if you fix the pain points] and those are linked to What does Success look like for each of your Goals? The top group of pain points all referred to maps, context and route and further down they were more concerned with ease of use of the websites they were viewing.

"Go away popups"

Personas

Next stage is personas. Handily Miro has a template already built in so I don't have to start from scratch. I can happily fill these in using the info from the people I interviewed them as I know them quite well and I've got quite an extensive amount of notes from the videos - you can see the personas here.

Each persona has:

  • Name and one line summary
  • Reasons to use our product
  • Goals
  • Personality
  • Interests
  • Skills
  • Tech savviness

I found that I can group them into 3 areas which helped as I was whittling down to 1-2 for using as references for justifying design decisions.

  • Gary Keanbean and Kate Enduro are seasoned riders who are good at planning and resource finding
  • Steve Dad is a family guy who likes cycling when he can get the time in so need the least amount of friction between planning and going
  • Bram Tourist and Matt Tourist are looking for things to see and places to stuff their face

The primary personas I picked were Steve Dad and an amalgam of Bram and Matt Tourist as I think they would get the most benefit from the site by being able to use it to get up and go on rides. Gary Keanbean and Kate Enduro are slightly better served in that they're more confident on planning and have different tried and tested avenues they already use. However they also provided a large chunk of the research info so it's definitely worth referencing them back.

It's worth noting there's some groups I could have also covered: kid friendly / retiree riders / people with really young kids (4 and under) / club riders. I'll likely return to some of these once the site is up and running and see what I can expand on.

The next bit

This may be where it get's slightly trickier. The first couple of stages have been achievable remotely. The next stages of Ideation / Storyboarding / Paper Prototypes can be done solo but get LOADS more benefit from working in groups so I'll have to research into a workaround for that. At the time of writing (early July 2020), the UK is slowly coming out of lockdown so we'll see where people's comfort levels in groups are and I might luckily get some heads together.

Comments? Email me at ed@edclews.com