Collate App Design UX / UI
user experience design (ux/ui)
The fact that most people interact with brands digitally means that the importance of delivering exceptional digital experiences is a must. In order to be equipped to do so, I completed a 10 week UX course at General Assembly - a school that helps professional to develop todays most in-demand skills.
I designed a visual storytelling app for creative people to easily share short features in a refined way.
Inform & Discover
During on-boarding users click through three instructional screens to learn what the app is for and how to use it. They can either sign up immediately or discover the app as a guest. They'll be promted to sign up once they take an action, such a liking a story or accessing their profile.
share stories
Users can share short stories easily, using pre-set templates or posting full images. Stories can be kept private, shared between a select group or shared to the whole Collate community.
Find & Save Stories
Find and save inspiring stories easily to your collections, and then use the individual assets to create your own stories. Gestures are used to place and scale images. The layout of the collections screen has a scrapbook feel to emphasise that it's a work in progress space.
The Design Process
Background
Many people use social media as a platform to share visual stories and experiences with a wide audience. Instagram and Pinterest are so successful because of their focus on image rich content, and image based storytelling is statistically found to be more engaging. These platforms are accessed primarily on mobile and people take in content in a quick and digestible way. They also want to post stories with minimal effort and time required but without diminishing the impactfulness of their posts.
Goals
Identify the main motivations for sharing and consuming visual stories, and the pain points that people encounter when doing so. Through research, find out how sharing and consuming visual stories can be made easier and more enjoyable for users.
Methodology
Conduct interviews with people who often use social media and other storytelling platforms to share content with others, after an initial briefing on the project.
Target Audience
Creative people, age 22 - 38 years who use social media to tell visual stories professionally and/or casually. They enjoy sharing and consuming visual stories and content and use social media as an inspiration source
Competitor Analysis
Here’s the range of apps and websites that I looked into for my competitive research. From Instagram - a simple image posting app, to Periscope for live broadcasting and more traditional blogging platforms like Tumblr, all of them are different ways of telling predominantly image based stories.
User Interviews
I interviewed 5 people within the creative industry who come up with visual stories for their work and for most of them in their personal lives too. I asked 12 questions to gain a better understanding of how and why these people share image based stories, their approach and they time they dedicated to creating and posting stories as well as the importance of feedback to them.
1 Sara Grant, senior brand content manager (radley london) 2 Lucie Watkins, Head of Creative (seasalt) 3 Liv Enqvist, freelance Creative consultant 4 Nicola Parker, Senior creative manager (sweaty betty) 5 Tom Hume, creative director (studio jubilee)
Creating Personas
Based on the results of my interviews, I created 2 persona’s to help me to identify the key features based on the types of people who would use the app. These ranged from a Head of Creative looking for inspiration, to a content writer showcasing her work and style.
Primary Persona
Clara, Age 30
Freelance Stylist
Lives in Clapham, London
Problem statement: Clara needs a way to share her work and stylistic identity directly to a like minded community, because she wants exposure to increase her chances of working on interesting projects.
Secondary Persona
Anna, Age 38
Art Director
Lives in Teddington, London
Problem statement: Anna needs a way to find and share relevant creative content easily to her colleagues and friends, because it’s important for her to inspire and inform people professionally and also because she thrives off high quality inspiration
Primary User flow
This user flow shows the happy path in red. It shows Clara ‘s journey to sharing a story with the COLLATE community.
Clara’s Task scenario: You’ve been styling a shoot and want to show off your good work. Show the community what you’ve been up to by sharing some pictures the shoot to the news feed.
Anna’s Task scenario: A story in the feed is relevant to the monochrome inspiration your collating. Save the story to your library under the category name ‘Monochrome’.
Testing & Iterations
Designing the screens for each user journey meant starting from low fidelity and working up to mid fidelity and then finally high fidelity prototypes. At each stage I tested the screens with people using marvel for a click-able prototype. This gave me a valuable insight into what was working and what needed improvements. I gave people 2 task scenarios to complete, one for the primary persona and another for the secondary persona.
