Digital Design Example
A business needed a way to input inventory on their phone
Methodology
The following map shows the user centric design process which serves to keep the good+ improve real pain points
User Research
Starting with the empathy, we interviewed potential app users to derive the motivations and pain points for our target audience.
Qualitative Interviews
"When I moved across country borders there were multiple agencies that needed documentation about the art that I owned. It would have been great to have all of the documents digitized and in a central location."
-Art Collector
"People come to me when they have inherited collections of unorganized items that they know very little about. The best thing for these people would be an easy and quick way to understand what they own."
-Professional Organizer and Sales Facilitator
Design Iteration
In the first iteration of the design, the usability focus was on maximum user flexibility. The product manager wanted to see a design where the user was able to create any key-value pair ensuring that we would not need to anticipate what users want to record about their item.
Realizing that users would feel lost on an empty screen with unlimited flexibility, I decided to encourage the creation of categories while also starting the user off with a few default categories.
From there the user can still create any key-value pairing while also being able to use the “uncategorized” tab if they do not want to take part in the categorization process.
Through user interviews I learned that the person documenting the items is often not the owner of the items but is instead an administrative helper. This user persona is more interested in a quick process that allows them to create snapshots of items. This process prioritizes speed and completion, leaving detailed notation for another occasion, likely while using desktop.
This iteration led me to a mobile, photo based app where users snap all of the relevant pictures of an item before moving on to add optional details about the item. Google Lens is integrated into the app, allowing details like name, model, value to be scrapped from websites where similar images appear.
Design Solution
Through usability sessions it became clear that Google Lens needed to be more prominent in the experience. Users are now prompted to select the google lens website result that looks like a match for their item. Keywords are then populated into the review page, with an easy way to edit or delete incorrectly pulled information.
Users are also given the option of taking photos of all items before moving on to the review screen for each item, or moving linearly(photo then review) one item at a time. This dual user flow aligns with the different mental models that I came across in user testing.
