UX Project Poetry Club: online learning, sharing and annotating platform
Background
As digital learning platforms continue to expand due to demand and world circumstances that prevent people from being physically in the same place, a growing need to create niche learning platforms arises. I am dedicated to develop a digital product (initially mobile) for people of all ages that are interested on reading, learning and creating poetry. My product will enable users to quickly search for poetry (textual and audiovisual), share poetry, and annotate poetry within the community.
Research Goal
The goal of this research is to understand how users interact with digital tools to read, share and annotate literature. I want to obtain a clear perspective on which digital products already provide literary learning capabilities, and what are the needs and opportunities in this sphere that we can explore and enable us to come up with a good user focused product.
Challenge or Problem Overview
I wanted to understand how users interact with digital tools to read, share and annotate literature. Additionally, to obtain a clear perspective on which digital products already provide literary learning capabilities, and what are the needs and opportunities in this sphere that I could explore and come up with a good user focused product. I am aiming to develop a digital product for users of all ages that are interested on reading, learning and creating poetry. The product will enable users to quickly search for poetry (textual and audiovisual), share poetry, and annotate poetry within the community.
Discovery: Research & Analysis
I discovered the user habits when it comes to search, read or share poetry on digital platforms. Most of the surveyed users use Poetry Foundation and Genius. Quickly enough, opportunities were found that these platforms do not offer: community focused poetry (e.g. ability to create poetry oriented threads); submit poetry to the platform; dictionary integration; NPL technology to quickly submit paper written poems.
Design: Concepts & Sketching
Throughout this process I set assumptions on what kind of features the application should contain and later these assumptions were validated through interviews and surveys. Later on, I started by doing the Crazy 8’s to quickly get something drawn of some of the features I planned to prototype. On the slide below, follows the Crazy 8’s drawing.
Test: Validation, Usability, Feedback
Based on feedback from users through the Lookback application, I was able to narrow down some of the flow road blocks they had encountered when testing the prototype. Some of the road blocks:
Dictionary Page: confusing Search button after search results;
- Sign In/Sign Up Pages: users expected to have a full flow where they “type” their username, password, etcetera;
- Poem Page: missing a back button to come back to the homepage;
- Poem Page: missing navbar link to the Dictionary Page;
- Poem Page Annotation: users expected to have a back button to return to the poem’s page
- Home Page: users were expecting that all elements on the navbar were navigational.
Design: Iteration
Accordingly to the feedback received through the usability tests, design iterations took place to enhance the user experience and to consolidate the flows.
The KPI that I chose to work with is decreased time on task for the Dictionary Page since roughly 70% of the users had a hard time understanding the flow of the functionality. In order to enhance the experience, I’ve completed the flow: from clicking on the input to insert a word, to clicking on search to resolve the search query – until the result was prompted. Additionally, the button text of the Dictionary’s results page was renamed to New Search so it clearly states that the search was accomplished and now the only way is to either go back to the Homepage or perform a new search.
The KPI that I chose to work with is decreased time on task for the Dictionary Page since roughly 70% of the users had a hard time understanding the flow of the functionality. In order to enhance the experience, I’ve completed the flow: from clicking on the input to insert a word, to clicking on search to resolve the search query – until the result was prompted. Additionally, the button text of the Dictionary’s results page was renamed to New Search so it clearly states that the search was accomplished and now the only way is to either go back to the Homepage or perform a new search.
Solution & Impact Overview
The final solution is a fully clickable high fidelity prototype that encompasses a set of functionality such as: user account, dictionary consultation, poetry annotation. Overall the users that were able to test the prototype were interested on its concept and visual appeal. The impact from this phase feels like it could definitely progress into something real.
