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GOOGLE PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATE:
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Role: Lead UX Designer
Responsibilities: Competitive auditing, conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, and iterating on designs.
Duration: Sept. 2022 - March 2023
Tools: Figma, Canva
The product: Rustic Love, Inc. is a rural wedding venue. Knowing how challenging it can be to find musicians who can make it to the out-of-the-way location (and whose technical needs can be met by the venue), they want to provide their couples with an stress-free, simplified process for booking wedding musicians who have already established a relationship with the venue.
The problem: Booking wedding musicians is overwhelming and time consuming for couples who have so much stressful wedding planning on their plate.
The goal: Design an app for couples who book the wedding venue (Rustic Love, Inc.) that allows an efficient and streamlined musician-booking process.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
User research: I created personas, user stories, and journey maps to consider the experiences of users I’m designing for and understand their needs. I then conducted interviews to further refine potential pain points.
Research defined my primary user group as "busy adults in the thick of stressful wedding planning", and informed me that genre preferences and pricing would largely impact how users navigate booking wedding musicians.
Pain Points:
Time
Working adults have limited available time to dedicate to the tedium of wedding planning.
Stress
Couples in the throes of wedding planning have many moving pieces to keep track of which can be incredibly overwhelming.
Budget
Knowing musician pricing up front is important for decision making, but rare in existing musician-booking platforms.
Persona #1
Problem Statement: Meredith is a busy working adult with dyslexia who needs a quick, non-”text heavy” solution to booking a wedding band because she has limited free time and struggles with reading a lot of text quickly.
User Journey Map:
Persona #2
Problem Statement: Damini is a new US citizen with a tight budget who needs a universally user-friendly way to book a wedding band he knows he can afford because English is not his first language and he is on a budget.
User Journey Map:
STARTING THE DESIGN
Paper Wireframes:
For my first round of wireframes, I focused on necessary app features and prioritized intuitive navigation and visual simplicity.
Digital Wireframes:
As I began my lo-fidelity wireframes, I fused feedback and findings from the user research with my earlier designs.
Having all of the important information upfront helped prevent users from perusing bands that might not work for them, and thus was key to saving users time.
Low-fidelity Prototype:
View the Rustic Love, Inc. low-fidelity prototype.
Usability Study - Findings:
I conducted two rounds of usability studies. The first study was based on my low-fidelity prototype and guided my high-fidelity designs. The second study used my high-fidelity prototype, and helped me further refine the app’s usability.
REFINING THE DESIGN
Sticker Sheet:
To begin my high-fidelity wireframes, I first had to create a sticker sheet to determine and guide the branding of my fabricated "Rustic Love, Inc.".
Mockups:
Since the “explore” button and the overlap of inbox/notifications confused users, I made the former more universally recognizable, and gave the latter their own separate pages.
Adding color, text, and branding to the mockups enhanced the ease of navigation for users.
High-fidelity Prototype:
View the Rustic Love, Inc. high-fidelity prototype.
Accessibility Considerations:
IMPACT & GOING FORWARD
Impact: The app makes couples feel a wave of stress relief and gratitude for the time they are saving by using it.
One quote from peer feedback:
“Using this app is making me really excited to plan a wedding and book a band!”
What I Learned: This project showed me that I alone truly cannot conceptualize all the needs other users might have. Conducting user research opened my eyes to how differently people’s approaches can be, both in planning weddings and in how they use their phones.
Next Steps:
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