I am doing my first actual redesign as a portfolio piece! How does my plan look?
Hi! Me again! Yea, I do post fairly regularly at the moment, but I really lack a UX mentor at the moment, so this is currently my go-to place for advice.
Project description
I need portfolio material, so I am redesigning a cinema website’s mobile version. It isn’t straight awful, but boy do I have my work cut out for me if my design hunches aren’t completely whack. I plan to include real users and compile my work as a case study to be hosted on my portfolio website. And yes, I am doing this on my own and I am actually a little worried about the timeframe because I plan to do at least one more case study.
My planned approach, so far
This is where I would like some sparring. Don’t be gentle, I am in this for the learning experience.
I want it to be easy and seamless to order movie tickets on your phone. I have used this website myself in the past and I have never liked it. Let’s see if I’m the only one who thinks this site needs some attention. I have drawn inspiration for my approach from the IDEO approach to design as seen below, but I haven’t really read in-depth about it, I was just inspired by a redesign of Fitbit case study I read over on uxdesign.cc.
- Platform assessment is my very first step, as it will allow for me to see the information architecture of the site through a IA tree.
“Looking at the IA without the veneer of the user interface allows you to interrogate its structure. How many categories are there? How narrow or wide is the IA? How shallow or deep is it? Are the number of items in each category roughly the same or vastly different?”
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Compare the site against market competitors / any decent cinema website. This can also help me get inspiration for the redesign and evaluate the best practices.
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Usability Test. I will plan a usability test to identify (if any) the usability problems of the site. I intend to do this by approaching people in public, asking politely for a bit of their time, and then have them perform exploratory tasks related to common cinema-site actions and observe their interactions.
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Create personas from user data. In order to move through the design iterations without constantly needing real users, I will develop a few personas to represent typical movie-goers. I put this as step 4 to avoid creating proto-personas.
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Create new IA with Card sorting is an option later to find a good IA structure.
Validating IA iteratively with a different version of card sort is essential to reducing the redesign to just the core features. -
Wireframes & prototypes. Paper time! I can finally put my recently purchased office supplies to real use.
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Validate, iterate. Eventually, I’ll produce a hi-fi prototype. Software choice pending.
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Write case study, present work on portfolio website. If I’ve done as much documentation of the process as I intend, this should be easy. I already have a decent homemade template ready for case studies. I intend to use great storytelling in my cases, drawing inspiration from some of the many good cases I have read and studied.
Notes and concerns
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In step 3, I conduct a test on the IA. Maybe I should do some guerrilla style testing with the actual product, instead, asking them to do a few different things on the site and writing down pain points? The project already involves plenty of card sorting. Please, weigh in.
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This is pretty ambitious for a one-man team. I intend to make one more case study for my portfolio, so maybe I need to limit the scope of this project just a little bit.