1) Overview
Project Timeline: 3 months
Role & Responsibilities: Principal designer responsible for all aspects of design process start to finish.
Astrology is a vast concept. Users from a variety of skill levels have different motives and goals for learning. I designed Kismet to help users retain information, and apply it to their personal lives.
User
🎯 Find user pain points and analyze competition.
🎯 Create solutions to make learning astrology easier.
🎯 Design something fresh, yet easy to use.
Business
🎯 Set the business apart from the competition by creating a unique solution.
🎯 Create a platform that helps content creators and professionals showcase their work and find clients.
2) Research
Understanding the goals and approaches to learning astrology.
Research Process
- Interviews
- Card Sorting
- Competitive Analysis
Hypothesis: People studying astrology spend a lot of time browsing for resources that fit their skill level. Many struggle to find the resources they need, which makes the process frustrating.
Key findings from interviews:
- Many users had multiple learning styles.
- All users mentioned visual and a collaborative learning, such as discussing, asking questions, or studying with others.
- The Pattern and Co-star were mentioned by nearly every person I interviewed, so I did additional analysis and studied those apps. They became a large source of inspiration for my designs, but what the users told me about these apps during the research process was most important.
Ultimately, there was a huge social component to peoples’ learning process, and trouble retaining information because they felt they didn’t have opportunities to apply it personally.
Affinity Map
Competitive Analysis
- Most apps did not have discussion feature.
- There was no way to ask questions and get feedback from others.
- None of the apps above allowed interaction between users. 2/3 apps mentioned in interviews allowed users to add each other and one allowed discussion.
If users need a social component to help them learn and retain information, why do so many apps lack collaborative features that give users a chance to apply their knowledge?
3) Define
Outlining the issue.
Persona
The target audience was anyone new to learning astrology. Ideally, people of all skill levels would use this app as those with more experience would be able to answer questions from those with less experience.
-
How might we create a solution that helps users apply their knowledge?
-
How might we present information in a gradual and appropriate way, so that the user has structure to their learning process?
-
How might we make asking questions and finding answers simple for the user to navigate independently?
POV & HMW
4) Ideate
Prioritizing solutions and building the blueprint.
Feature Matrix
My research showed me social relations was a motive when learning astrology, and was essential to retaining the information. The social aspect tied into the need for a discussion page and different ways to interact with people.
The onboarding quiz and interest selection helped curate topics specific for users. This would reduce confusion and save the user time.
Discussion prompts were notifications that gave the users opportunities to apply their skills and receive feedback. This was also a way for the business to keep users active on the platform.
Due to personal interest in this project, I had several feature ideas, but prioritizing based on user needs and research themes was essential.
Task Flows
I found the most important features to be:
- Curation of topics based on user interests and onboarding quiz.
- Notifications with a suggested discussion prompts to inspire users to engage in conversation and exercise their knowledge.
Site Map
Building a site map helped me further organize content and were a nice additional tool to solidify task flows.
5) Design
Exploring the visual possibilities and creating a brand.
Sketches
I used different sources of inspiration to create my wireframes, and referred back to them to be sure I wasn’t missing any design elements. I ended up mixing elements from multiple sketches to create the best possible design.
Wire Frames
I created key screens using the most valuable features. Before going to a higher fidelity, I got feedback on these designs and started choosing typography, color, and logo.
Logo and Branding
My inspiration for the logo was inspired by planetary glyphs. I wanted the colors to be inspired by the night sky, which was a huge factor in choosing dark-mode for this design. My goal was to achieve a modern feel, and appeal to the younger target audience while remaining friendly to any possible user.
High-fidelity
After getting feedback, I changed the placement of the ‘skip question’ and ‘back’ buttons, and designed an alternative interest selection screen.
I fine tuned the colors and removed the text from the logo when it appeared after the log-in screen.
6) Test
Creating prototypes and testing my designs.
Testing:
- User goes through onboarding with quiz and interest selection.
- User responds to a discussion prompt notification.
Method:
- A/B Testing.
- Hybrid moderated testing.
Results
- 100% Completion rate with some confusion on discussion prompt page.
- A/B testing to affirm small design iterations.
- Icons needed simplifying.
- Streamline onboarding.
A/B Testing
Before
Iterations
After
7) Reflect
What’s next?
What I learned:
Being responsible for all record-keeping during the interview process was overwhelming at times, so recording sessions can be really helpful.
What went well:
Prototyping was not as in depth as I thought, so I didn’t spend as much time as I had anticipated. I was personally interested in this topic, so this project was really enjoyable.
What I would do differently:
I would have applied dark mode to my wireframes to save time. Card sorting didn’t impact my design much and I could’ve utilized that time else where. Overall, the quality of my testing results could’ve been better, but I did not want to do unmoderated testing because this was my first testing experience.
Next Steps:
Next steps would be expanding on existing features, and adding new ones based on current feature matrix. Then testing and iterating on these features throughout the design process.