Burnout: The Car Finding App
My First Project
Art and graphic design never came naturally to me and it was one of my weaknesses as a child. With my first real introduction to the world of UX, this class focused on UX/UI principles.
Understanding visual design concepts felt at times as if I was Sisyphus. With continued practice and adapting the skills being taught in class, I was able to roll the boulder up the mountain.
This project was a friend of mine's idea he and his friends had for a car app. As I was asking him questions about his idea along with explaining to me the problem he saw in car culture, I made a realization. I realized that I was doing a bit of empathy mapping, user interviews, and surprisingly of all, stakeholder communication. I felt this process of researching felt natural and organic. I saw the importance of creating a solid foundation going beyond an interface became critical in designing strong user experiences.
My friend's problem was about car culture that he and a few of his friends experienced when recommending cars to people. I was asking him to elaborate on his problem while I was empathizing with him in finding a way to solve his problem.
For research, I spent time learning more about car culture. Although the class I was in was focused on UI, I felt a need to understand my users first. I asked my friend about his experience at a race legal event along with going to the drag strip.
At the time of this project, I did not dive deeply into UX Research because the class this assignment was for was geared toward UI principles. However, naturally working with my friend who acted as a stakeholder taught me the need for understanding my users' behavior and cognition when they interact with technology and the experience surrounding the technology.
Looking back at this design, there is a lot I would change from building a design system, following appropriate design guidelines, building a more comprehensive information architecture, more user testing, qualitative and quantitative research to justify features and experiences, and even some ethnographic studies to understand car culture on a deeper level, plus learn more about the diverse subcultures of gearheads. I also would want to go back to the ideation board and have new design sprints in creating a strong experience first by creating more strongly defined personas outside of my stakeholders.
With all that said, I feel it's better to leave this project as-is. I believe in a growth mindset and knowing where I came from to where I am now has allowed me to reflect on the past in order to build the foundation for a brighter future.
Burnout: The Car Finding App
My first take at design with lessons learned
This first project highlighted the need to understand users' needs since users hold insight into usability that works for them.
Looking back at this project, I should have spent more time on qualitative UX Research and focusing on interactions and experiences gained over visual aesthetics. Reflecting on this project, I would want to reorganize the content of this app along with following the proper guidelines for the OS that this app would be on, or following best practices for responsive web design.