Case Study
Role
UX designer
Team members
Vania Liu
Timeline
Feb - May 2024
Tools
Figma, Wordpress
Methods and Approach
User Research, Affinity Mapping, Persona Creation, Journey Mapping, Competitive Analysis, Information Architecture, Wireframing, Prototyping, Hi-Fi Mockups, Usability Testing
View Prototype
Justine Wang is a dancer and educator passionate about connecting people through dance and empathy. As an avid dancer myself, I saw this as an opportunity to use my skills out of dance to give back to someone trying to build a community through dance. My goal with this project was to create a professional website that would open a wider channel of connection between Justine and her future clients.
Justine may not have already had a working website, but I didn't have to start from scratch, either. Because of her past projects and teaching experience, Justine already had a good amount of content I could use. My main task, then, was figuring out how best to organize these into a website that effectively conveyed who Justine was as a professional dancer and teacher.
User research
Because of my own experience in the dance community, I had a better understanding of what a holistic approach to user research looks like in this context. Though Justine's initial goal was to have more student dancers reach out to her for privates, I discovered through our conversations that her website could help her gain other work opportunities as well. Because anyone would be able to access the website, dance studio managers would be able to see it as well, and that could lead to opportunities such as a teaching slot, pop-up workshops, and other opportunities for her to grow her business. So, I decided to target two specific user parties: students, Justine's original focus, and studios. I performed 4 in-depth user interviews and consolidated the data as follows:
Students and studios want to be able to easily access and view a dancer's previous work instead of having to dig across multiple platforms like Instagram and YouTube
Studios strongly prefer instructors that have a trustworthy reputation in the dance community. This could be in the form of a referral from someone who already works at said studio, if they have mutual acquaintances, or if they have an established following
Students and studios both primarily use social media as their primary way of finding new instructors.
In summary, both students and studios like to know what, or who, they're signing up for before committing to a class with a new instructor. This tells me that in addition to marketing Justine as a business, I have to be able to authentically communicate who she is as a person and an instructor through my designs as well.
Meet our users
Using our synthesized data, we built upon two existing personas.
Gianna, 24
Gianna is hoping to find resources that can help her manage the mental and emotional aspects of living with vitiligo and improve her overall quality of life.
As a current user of Your Daily, she’s benefitted from the free content on the app and would like to try some of Your Daily’s paid programs.
As someone who’s more money-conscious, Gianna needs more transparency of information when it comes to courses and workshops to trust that they will improve her confidence and quality of life.
Jennifer, 43
Jennifer is looking to reinvigorate her self-care.
Though she's successfully achieved remission of her Hashimoto's, life has begun to overwhelm her and she no longer feels in control of her health and doesn’t know where to look for help.
Jennifer needs more personal and supportive tools to help her develop a more sustainable and authentic self-care routine.
Ideation
Upon completing research, we arrived at these main design goals:
Creating a structure for paid content that is easy to navigate and makes the user feel well-informed
Creating a welcome flow that guides users into the app seamlessly and makes users feel cared for
Creating an organization structure for journal prompts
We began our design process by sketching. I focused on redesigning the paywall, the final screen of the welcome flow and homepage, and the journal prompt page.
Taking inspiration from our sketches, I created the initial lo-fi wireframes. Here are some of the key features:
A synopsis page that comes at the end of the welcome flow. It includes a synopsis and recommendations based on the user's response to the entry questionnaire. It also gives the option to see the Membership paywall or go directly to the homepage.
The paywall itself is split into two screens via a toggle, and the courses page leads into product pages with more information about specific courses.
The journal prompt page is now categorized by different topics and moods to better target user's needs.
After showing the wireframes to the founder and making requested adjustments, we prototyped the wireframes to prepare for usability testing.
Usability Testing
We then prototyped the frames and performed usability tests with users that we had interviewed earlier and current users of the app so they have an experience with the app they can compare our designs against.
User feedback indicated that the experience was improved and more personalized for them, and their concerns shifted to focus on specific content such as language that lacked clarity and better differentiation between paid and free content.
With this feedback, we then brought our wireframes into hi-fi.
How do we continue to grow Your Daily?
Because the goal of Your Daily is to involved in a user's health and self-care, it is important that the language being used be approved by a medical professional before going live in order for us to be responsible designers.
During usability testing, a user brought up that some autoimmune diseases may lead to flare-ups that limit a user's mobility. This would render the flare-up button inaccessible in it's button form alone. It would be extremely worthwhile to incorporate a more accessible design for this button.\
Though not all women have autoimmune diseases, many do experience stress or anxiety that may be assuaged by this app. I think more market research could be done to see what other users could also benefit from this app, and what other business opportunities are within reach.
