Trishnguyen2001 - UX & UI (Level 2) Pathway

SELF-ASSESSMENT - WEEK 1

1) WHAT I LEARNED

  • Technical Area:

    • UX Research Methods (qualitative vs. quantitative research, card sorting, usability testing, surveys, etc.)
    • Introduction to Figma
    • Preparing an Interview Guide
  • Tools:

    • STEM-Away forum
    • Discord
    • Figma
  • Soft Skills:

    • Considering candidates’ backgrounds when reviewing their eligibility to be interviewed
    • Project management
    • Teamwork and communication

2) THREE ACHIEVEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • Getting to know my team members and establishing communication with them was great. I look forward to working with them!
  • Gaining insight and background on the bioinformatics community will prove valuable going forward in our collaboration with the Bioinformatics pathway.
  • It was informative for me to consider the eligibility of different people that could be interviewed based on their background.

3) TASKS COMPLETED

  • Conducted secondary research on the bioinformatics community and scope.
  • Created a presentation after analyzing and interpreting research
  • Established a list of potential interview candidates from the Bioinformatics pathway
  • Created a list of potential interview questions

4) CHALLENGES

  • Reaching out to my team and establishing consistent communication was the most difficult part of this week. There was quite a bit of confusion about meeting times, but I’m glad we sorted everything out. Having a Discord server set up for us was a big improvement and will greatly improve our workflow!

SELF-ASSESSMENT - WEEK 2

1) WHAT I LEARNED

  • Technical Area:

    • Generative Research Methods (interviews, focus groups)
    • Figma (create presentation)
    • Preparing an Interview Guide
    • Miro (stakeholder map, personas)
    • Intro to Trello (project management platform)
  • Tools:

    • STEM-Away forum
    • Discord
    • Figma
    • Miro
    • Trello
    • Slack
  • Soft Skills:

    • Interview participant outreach
    • Project management
    • Teamwork and communication
    • Conducting a semi-structured interview

2) THREE ACHIEVEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • Completing personas for three different groups of users (BI scientist, STEM-Away BI team member, and STEM-Away BI team mentor) helped me analyze and empathize the users of the education app through different lenses. It really helped me gain a basic understanding of what to expect once we started interviewing our candidates.
  • Preparing an interview guide and conducting a semi-structured interview was a deeply insightful experience, and it is a skill I hope I will be able to practice more in the future.
  • Reviewing and analyzing the information gained from the interviews helped me to form a direction this project could possibly move in. Of course, this is still early in this project, so I will remain open to any direction.

3) TASKS COMPLETED

  • Conducted generative research on stakeholders that are active participants in STEM-Away’s BI pathway.
  • Created a presentation after analyzing and interpreting the research done.
  • Established a line of communication with the BI pathway.
  • Created personas and a stakeholder map to better understand our user-base.

4) CHALLENGES

  • Many new platforms were put into use for our teamwork this week, including Miro, Figma, and Trello. I had little to no experience using all of these platforms, so it took me a bit to figure them out. However, it was quite easy to pick them up and I found them to be very useful. Trello, in particular, stood out to me, and I love the way it helps keep the whole team on the same page.

SELF-ASSESSMENT - WEEK 3

1) WHAT I LEARNED

  • Technical Area:

    • Generative Research Methods (interviews)
    • Figma (create journey maps)
    • Miro (create personas)
  • Tools:

    • STEM-Away forum
    • Discord
    • Figma
    • Miro
    • Trello
    • Slack
  • Soft Skills:

    • Interview participant outreach
    • Project management
    • Teamwork and communication
    • Conducting a semi-structured interview

2) THREE ACHIEVEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • Reworking our personas from last week to include pain points helped me better understand the purpose of personas. Previously, I thought we were getting a generally overview of a group of users, but now I understand that we need to focus more on the context of them interacting with the product.
  • I improved my interview guide from last week to conduct interviews more smoothly this week. After watching the recording of my interview from last week, I saw that I had to concentrate on design aspects more, and not just on the candidate’s general background. I made sure to include that in the interviews I did this week.
  • Expanding our personas into journey maps also helped me further understand how users will interact with our application. Using our personas helped us narrow down that scope of interaction, which I found to be very insightful.

3) TASKS COMPLETED

  • Conducted semi-structured interviews with members from STEM-Away’s BI pathway
  • Continued outreach towards potential interview candidates
  • Created personas and journey maps

4) CHALLENGES

  • Building a journey map forced me to come up with realistic scenarios in which our persona would interact with the product. I specifically struggled with splitting the scenario up into stages, as I wasn’t sure what stages would be appropriate. After talking with my team, I found being specific with the stages and using them to clearly define tasks the persona would be doing was a good route. Overall, completing the journey maps helped me further my understanding of what interface features needed priority.

SELF-ASSESSMENT - WEEK 4

1) WHAT I LEARNED

  • Technical Area:

    • Ideating Methods (storyboarding, flowcharts)
    • Figma
    • Miro
  • Tools:

    • STEM-Away forum
    • Discord
    • Figma
    • Miro
    • Trello
    • Slack
  • Soft Skills:

    • Project management
    • Teamwork and communication
    • Conducting a semi-structured interview
    • Brainstorming with team

2) THREE ACHIEVEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • Using the feedback from mentors and Team 3, we improved our journey maps and personas to better model realistic users.
  • Building off the personas and journey maps from last week, I worked on the storyboards and flowcharts with my team. I felt that this allowed me to empathize with specific user actions more than just the journey map alone.
  • I gained wonderful insight from an interview I conducted this week. The gave me pertinent information about the direction of the BI application, including possible layouts for the app.

3) TASKS COMPLETED

  • Conducted semi-structured interviews with members from STEM-Away’s BI pathway
  • Created storyboards to ideate how users will interact with our product
  • Created flowcharts to visualize possible user interactions

4) CHALLENGES

  • I struggled understanding the flow chart a bit because I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to depict user actions or interface options. My team and I went for a more interface approach. However, after critiquing Team 3’s flow charts, we found their app logic to be much more in depth than ours. We will be revising our flow chart to reflect more user actions.
  • I was also struggling with understanding what direction the BI team wanted to go in for the application (platform, specific aspects, etc.). They will be holding a joint meeting this week, so I’m hoping that clears up a lot of confusion.

SELF-ASSESSMENT - WEEK 5

1) WHAT I LEARNED

  • Technical Area:

    • Designing UI Features
    • Excalidraw (create wireflow/wireframes)
    • Design Heuristics
    • Gestalt’s Principles
  • Tools:

    • STEM-Away forum
    • Discord
    • Figma
    • Trello
    • Excalidraw
  • Soft Skills:

    • Gain insight from past research to create UI features
    • Project management
    • Teamwork and communication
    • Research on each stage of the BI pipeline

2) THREE ACHIEVEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • Redoing the flowchart based on last week’s insights helped me better understand how a user should interact with the platform.
  • Designing wireframes for our prototype helped solidify my understanding of the app.
  • Creating the wireflow deepened my understanding of how a user should navigate through the app. It also highlighted potential issues and how to fix them during our prototyping phase.

3) TASKS COMPLETED

  • Conducted more extensive research on BI application stages.
  • Created wireframes and a wireflow.
  • Revised our flowchart.

4) CHALLENGES

  • While creating our wireflow, we struggled determining the location for each element on our interface. However, referring back to our insights and viewing examples from other sources helped us formulate the layout of our interface.
  • During our deliverables meeting, it was highlighted that users could potentially get stuck using our interface. I thought this was a valid point, but I am unsure how to fix this. Currently, we need to implement a clearer direction for the user, meaning they should not be confused as to where to go next. We also need to put more emphasis on how this should be an educational application, so we need to incorporate more of those elements as well. I greatly valued all this feedback.

SELF-ASSESSMENT - WEEK 6

1) WHAT I LEARNED

  • Technical Area:

    • Designing UI Features
    • Lo-fi Prototyping
    • Design Heuristics
  • Tools:

    • STEM-Away forum
    • Discord
    • Figma
    • Trello
  • Soft Skills:

    • Gain insight from past research to create UI features
    • Project management
    • Teamwork and communication

2) THREE ACHIEVEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • Converting our wireflow from Excalidraw (from last week) to a prototype in Figma allowed us to re-evaluate and improve on our UI. The process also allowed me to ensure the flow of the application worked well and was clear to users.
  • During the prototyping process, I learned a lot about the many features Figma has. Their prototyping logic is well thought out and allows you to efficiently create a mock-up of an application. We tried to explore all stages and their options as extensively as possible.
  • We discussed possible user testing questions and formatted them into a Google Form to send out and receive feedback from the BI pathway. We tried to phrase the questions to be unbiased. However, after getting feedback on the form, we realized a better approach would be to ask the candidates to perform tasks instead of asking specific questions.

3) TASKS COMPLETED

  • Converted wireflow into low-fidelity prototype.
  • Revised UI design decisions (specifically element placement).
  • Created Google Form for user testing.

4) CHALLENGES

  • While creating our prototype, we struggled implementing all the small interactions. Specifically, we had to figure out how to use overlays and to properly close them. However, we plan to add on more features soon. We want to implement scrolling capabilities and how to keep overlays permanent on the screen while being able to interact with other elements. We also still need to refine our settings page, but I am still happy with our progress so far. I am excited to convert this into a high-fidelity prototype soon.

SELF-ASSESSMENT - WEEK 7

1) WHAT I LEARNED

  • Technical Area:

    • Designing UI Features
    • Hi-fi Prototyping
    • Design Heuristics
    • Usability Testing Methods
  • Tools:

    • STEM-Away forum
    • Discord
    • Figma
    • Trello
  • Soft Skills:

    • Preparing and conducting usability testing in an unbiased/unleading manner
    • Project management
    • Teamwork and communication

2) THREE ACHIEVEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • Conducting usability testing gave us great insight on areas of improvement for our prototype.
  • Refining the low-fidelity prototype into a high-fidelity one gave us an opportunity to synthesize the insights we gained from our usability testing. It also taught me new features of Figma.
  • Condensing all of our past deliverables into a presentation format forced us to pull important points from each stage of our process. This helped me better understand the most valuable learning points from this internship.

3) TASKS COMPLETED

  • Refined lo-fi prototype into hi-fi prototype
  • Conducted usability testing
  • Created presentation depicting our progress throughout the project

4) CHALLENGES

  • The aspect I struggled most with this week was the conversion of our prototype from low to high fidelity, specifically when it came to creating an attractive UI for our prototype. Based off our usability testing, the majority of our UI was functional. After looking at other medical dashboards and UIs, we drew inspiration in terms of color schemes and organization of elements. We were aiming for a clean and professional looking UI, but also got feed back to make it seem more fun, as it is an educational app. We will definitely consider implementing this later on.

SELF-ASSESSMENT - WEEK 8

1) WHAT I LEARNED

  • Technical Area:

    • Applying Feedback to Hi-fi Prototyping
    • Designing and Structuring an Effective Presentation
  • Tools:

    • STEM-Away forum
    • Discord
    • Figma
  • Soft Skills:

    • Public Speaking
    • Project management
    • Teamwork and communication

2) THREE ACHIEVEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

  • Converting our draft presentation into a more professional format. During the process, we had to incorporate the feedback from the previous kick off meeting, which helped us extract the most important components from our project.
  • Applied feedback from the draft demonstration to refine our high fidelity prototype. This allowed us to reconsider UI aspects and elements to improve our overall prototype.
  • Practiced and delivered final presentation to mentors and fellow interns. We were able to further practice our presentation for the external presentation and also gain more valuable feedback.

3) TASKS COMPLETED

  • Refined hi-fi prototype
  • Enhanced final presentation
  • Revised past deliverables to match aesthetic of presentation

4) CHALLENGES

  • The aspect I struggled most with this week was the presentation itself. I had practiced a bit beforehand, but I still blanked during the presentation. We also ran into some technical issues when presenting the slides, so I will need to look into ways to mitigate that too. The mentors recommended we simply export the whole presentation as a PDF for the external presentation, and I think that is a good option. Other than that, I think just practicing the presentation more will help everything go smoother.