UX Research, UI Design

Arbor

a digital rolodex for your back pocket

Project Overview

As systems move towards technology and the phone becomes central in your back pocket, how do you take your list of business cards on the go?

Arbor is a mobile contacts application for professionals to manage, track, and keep themselves accountable during their networking experience.

My Contributions

With a UI/UX design partner, I designed this project from scoping it out and brainstorming the topic to final prototype, which we tested out on a sample group.

It took three months to complete the project, in which I focused on conducting research and designing the user flow and visual layout.

Process

Beginning with the storyboard to visualize the current and potential experience, we then created an affinity map and personas to group and characterize different possible flows.

Finally, we designed an interactive prototype through Figma, which we tested with various users before landing on the ultimate design.

User Research

We first conducted user research to understand how the app would help someone in their networking journey.

Storyboard

This exercise helped me understand the key moments during a networking experience when the typical business card exchange takes place. We sketched a few key screens that the app might show to illustrate how we could potentially present our solution.

Field Observation

We studied the student and professional population at UCI's career fair with hypothesis on hand, where we gained crucial understanding to the type of environment users might use the app in.

Affinity Diagram

Finally, our affinity diagram helped group observations, insights, and common problems professionals face by similar values and other characteristics that helped form our user personas.

The biggest takeaway was discovering the goals that different users had.
Users fell into three categories: true beginners, well-prepared students, and professionals already in the field.

Personas

With the findings from the storyboard and observations on hand, we culminated our affinity diagram conclusions into 3 personas.
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1) Jessica Chan - Social Introvert
Goal: wants a mentor, to practice her professionalism, and to ease the anxity that comes with networking
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2) Austin Barclay - Early Professional
Goal: to keep track of potential new freelance clients and people he meets every day
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3) Wade Wilson - The One with a Plan
Goal: to cultivate a 1-on-1 relationship with the recruiters by asking a lot of relevant questions at a fair

Conclusion

This project was very pivotal in my understanding of the value of research and user personas within the design process. Not only did I create better, more detailed usability tests than ever before, I grew confidence in conducting these tests as well as understanding the value of them.

I also learned that the different steps of the design process were meant to be used as tools to understand the user. It wasn't just a linear equation to churning out a product.

A poignant example was how my partner and I almost forgot about a whole flow altogether - we were too focused on designing for the perfect path. The affinity map reminded us to fall back in line with the project scope, and to design a flow for a user we would not have considered before.