Final Project: Designing for UX III

PHASE 2: DEFINE

The deliverables for this phase is quite a bit, esp coming out with the persona and experience strategies (something that is quite 'open' in a way)

Deliverables are:

i) report on phase 2
ii) 8 min presentation
- Need for product
- Possible solutions (based on user research)
- Target users and user profile
- Personas - advanced and anti user
- Functionality specifications
- Experience strategy
- Product benefit specification

Need for product (Focus Group)

To finish up where we started off, we decided to do a quick focus group with 15 respondents, with the aim of gathering more data and info on the needs and proposed solutions for PAL, as we felt that the initial interview results was decent, but not sufficient.

The focus group was proved useful to us, with most agreeable with what we are proposing, but suggested some interesting stuff ( to be elaborated below )

The 5 main takeaways (in brief) from our analysis are:
i) timeliness info (high accuracy of information, 24/7, up-to-date)
ii) navigation (ease of browsing, organized website)
iii) concise booking procedures (for both online and sms. Step by step guide preferred)
iv) secured and cashless (major credit cards and topping up via AXS stations/7-11)
v) affordability (low or minimal booking fee)

Target Users and profile

The Assignment 2 that we did did proved useful! We were able to churn out the persona profiling with previous knowledge of the dos and donts. We finally came out with "The Convenience Seekers" and the opposing "Price Conscious". Ultimately, our product does cater/ or hope to cater to users/drivers who wants to be in control of their time, being able to book a lot @ their own convenience and enjoy the perks of the seamless and convenient booking system. Time saved. As the saying goes, a happy customer is a paying customer (my saying, haha), making it a win win situation to both parties (users and client).

Functionality Specifications

The entire research and project is pretty much user based, thus our approach of the user-centric design. With much info gathered from the interview and focus group, we were able to come out with the functionality requirements, which are mainly,

i) Aesthetics (simplicity, visually pleasing, balance of images, text, animation)
ii) Workflow & Info Architecture (Uncluttered, 3 clicks approach, speedy system response)
iii) Interactivity (one of our key in providing UX in our website. Must have visibility, affordance and mapping in an unique and interactive format)

We try to keep our focus in these 3 main areas first, if not, there will most definitely be a tendency of having a feature creep. We will then be stuck in the 'overpromise, underdeliver' situation.

However, we will still keep users in the loop thruout the creation of our product life cycle, making appropriate changes and additional features when necessary.

Experience Strategies

This was sort of the 'toughest' part of this phase's deliverables. Although we firmly believe in the user centric design, we are also aware of the cons that it potentially brings. One harmful aspect as mentioned by Norman is the possibilities that we change something/feature for a certain group of users, but indirectly making another group 'unhappy'. It seems like a double edged sword. We should weigh the cost and benefits before doing the change. This leads to one of our X Strategies: Increase adoptions and conversions.

We will and want to make improvements and changes, but the end product that we are seeking from changing, is to get new conversions of users, and not losing current ones!

The other important point is to enhance customer satisfaction thru maintaining the system's interactivity and asethetics. It is somewhat agreeable to the phase "Attractive things work better", and this goes inline with BJ Fogg (Stanford)'s emphasis on persuasion (thru visual designs and expected content)

These 2 major experience strategies, along with UCD, are pretty much our focal point in our PAL system.

Comments and feedback

There wasnt as much feedback to most of the groups as compared to the presentation on phase 1. Perhaps most of the people were rather critical initially to the novelty ideas presented (something which Mr. Reddy forced us to do, ahah.)

One quick note from gerald was that he mentioned the high take up rate of GPS in the states and he believes that our system can go hand in hand with the GPS system rather well. We agreed totally. As per our 1st presentation, we mentioned GPS as one of the medium that we are hoping to use. However, the take up rate is still not high at all. I think its like, less than 5% of the private vehicles are equipped with GPS. HOWEVER,

if you read the news recently (a blog's perspective - http://blog.simplyjean.com/2008/02/07/singapore-to-adapt-gps-for-erp-and-other-miscellaneous-stuffs/) it seems that in the near future, most, if not all vehicles will have GPS "connectivity" onboard them. This will really make our system high integrated to the GPS technology, and thus, more convenience to the end users.