WHERE: Davis, CA

WHEN: February-March 2019

ROLE: UX Designer (individual project)

TOOLS: InVision, Adobe Illustrator, Personas, Storyboarding, Paper wire-framing

Project Overview

In this personal project, I created a mobile design using UI UX design principles. I wanted to design an application that would help people find free public wifi sources because the lack of service and accessibility to wifi sources were struggles shared among many low-income and under-represented minority groups. I narrowed my target audience down to people working overseas away from their families because they are the group of people that would benefit most from solving the wifi accessibility problem. People working away from their families with limited data plans don’t have easy access to communication with their family. This app would bridge people working overseas with their families by showing all the nearest free wifi sources, available outlets, open hours, and quietness levels of each place. Everyone deserves a peaceful, private place to chat with their loved ones. Easier accessibility to public resources is possible through this App.

Problem Statement

People with limited data plans need easy access to public resourced wifi so they can spend more time connecting with their family and not worrying about constantly saving data.

Personas

“How Might We” …?

After taking a dive into my users’ lives and seeing what they have to go through, I began to think of how might we statements. I saw the problem for not only what it was but also how it really affected these people. By building this empathy through the creation of personas, I really started thinking about their pain points more concretely and writing “How Might We” statements. The HMW that really captured the essence of my users’ needs was:

How might we create a space that allows my user to communicate with their family remotely while staying in the constraints of their financial budget?

By answering my “How Might We” question, I began seeing feasible possibilities and forming a design synthesis.

Preliminary Storyboarding/ Paper Wireframing

After understanding the users’ journey I was able to come up with design essentials:

• Having a map that showed nearby wifi locations based on user’s location

• Creating a toggle between map and list view

• Having a place preference page

I chose these as must-have specifications because they were each specific pieces that satisfied my users’ needs and solved the main problem. The design essentials set the basis for creating an application that makes public wifi more accessible.

The way-finding interface had to be either a map or list of wifi locations because those information design displays were the most familiar to my audience. Why did I keep both displays as options? One of my personas was more analytical, therefore having information in a list view was more desirable. Whereas, my second persona who is more visual, preferred a more graphical interface with more icons. This pattern was also common among many map like interfaces.

To make the app more personable, I wanted to allow users create their own profile where they could have their personal place preferences. This feature would give users the option to pick the places they would be most comfortable to chat and relax in. The app would then display the preferred places first based on the users’ choices.

Concept Testing

Here was my first round of user feedback (6 participants):

• Profile page needs to have the title smaller to give more visual hierarchy to the logo

• Add more pages to create a longer task flow

• Make things look more clickable

• Add navigation menu to all pages so user can easily go back to where they were

• Add Directions Page

• Add About Page

• Make sure information boxes are not cut off

• Add more features to preference page

• No consideration of time zones or localization

Post Testing Improvements

After receiving feedback, I was able to fix the visual hierarchy, eliminate items that seemed to be clickable, add missing flows, and add some features to make the application more personalized. I thought about how my users shared the same pain point of having their family be in a different time zones. To make their lives easier, I added a feature that displayed their current location time, their hometown time, and any other places they might want to keep track of. Additional information was also included in each wifi location: place name, miles away from user’s location, wifi strength, available outlets, busyness, open hours, and a directions button. I felt this information would be very useful because my users need a quiet place to talk with family and a strong internet connection for high quality video streaming.