A series of screenshots from the onboarding flow for Embers

Embers

UX Design, Project Management
Project Overview
This was a solo design project that I completed during my CareerFoundry Introduction to UX Design course.  The purpose of this course was to walk the student (me) through the basic process of UX design to prepare for the Immersion course, a deeper dive into UX design processes and tools.
The task was to design an app to help people who are trying to learn a new language.

- Class project for CareerFoundry Intro to UX Design
- Completed part-time between July 2021 and November 2021
- User Research, User Flows, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing
My Contributions
Sole UX Designer and Project Manager
Tools Used
Marvel
Figma
Whimsical
Zoom
Google Slides
The Process
For this project, I went through the steps of the Design Thinking process from Understand to Test.  For the purpose of this class project, Story Telling and Present were not used.

Empathize

In order to understand the needs of my potential users, it was important to first understand what tools they currently have available, and get a picture into their current behaviors.  To move towards that understanding, I conducted a competitive analysis of three popular language learning apps, and conducted user interviews.

User Interviews Takeaways

What participants are thinking:
What participants are feeling:
What participants are doing:

Define

With my initial research in hand, I was able to create a proto-persona and problem statement based on the insights from my user interviews.  This section of the course is meant to be a quick overview, which is why there is only one proto-persona instead of more in-depth user personas that would be used when the designer has more time.

Proto-Persona

A proto-persona for Embers

Problem Statement

Austin needs a way to continually and incrementally improve his German skills over time.  We will know this to be true when he marks the flashcards as complete for each deck.
I also used the Define phase as a time to create job tasks and user flows.  I discovered that I really love making user flows!  The process of writing down the steps that the user goes through really helps organize the features in my head, and it gets the creative juices flowing for the next phase.

You can see my user flow below!

User Flow

A user flow on a gray background: Create Account, then sign up with email or SSO, then select account type and sign up, or enter email address and password and sign up.

Ideate

This is where I got to start really sketching out my ideas and making paper lo-fi wireframes.  After I sketched those out, I tried out Marvel for the first time!  I had used Figma to create prototypes in a prior class, but I loved how with Marvel I could easily link up my paper wireframes into a quick prototype. If you’d like, you can try out this initial prototype, below!

Test

I really love the ideate and test part of the UX design process, and now that I had my lo-fi prototype, I was able to start my usability testing!

I tested with 4 participants for 10 minute sessions each. I gave them 4 tasks to complete, and rated the issues that arose on the Nielson Severity Scale.

Usability Testing Takeaways

Issue
Solution
After reviewing and compiling the feedback from the usability testing, I created a higher fidelity prototype in Figma and incorporated changes informed by my test data. You can see this prototype below!

Final Prototype

Learnings

For the purpose of the course, this project stopped after the Testing phase.

This was my first time prototyping in Marvel, though since then I have used it for other projects.  

I found that Marvel is great for quick prototypes where the designer isn’t carefully planning out their components ahead of time.  I think that for a designer with very solid pre-planning, Figma may still save more time.

Through the usability testing I found that I need to pay special attention to providing clear instructions and feedback to my users, to make sure that they aren’t confused.  This is something that I am continuing to develop in my skillset.

This was a fun project, and I look forward to working on more projects in the future!