Client: Modern Masters
Platforms: React Native, WordPress
Tools: Google Drive, Airtable, RealtimeBoard/Miro, Figma
Process: User Interviews, Empathy Mapping, Personas, Story Mapping, Wire-frame, Visual Design
Team: Nathan Nash, Mary Gabrielle, Dana Harvey, John Lund
Discovery
User Interviews
Working with Dana, I conducted interviews over the phone to gather insights from our early adopters. The early adopters have pledged to pay eleven dollars a month because they believed in the mission. Even though there wasn’t a minimum viable product yet. The participants of the user interviews all had one thing in common. An experience of paranormal activity. In total, I was able to speak with six individuals. The questions I asked are derived from scientific inventories on spiritual and religious experiences. Perhaps the biggest challenge with these interviews was that some participants experienced trauma as a result of alleged paranormal activity. This made it difficult to create a natural conversation. Fortunately, I was able to adapt by establishing rapport and empathizing with their concerns.
Empathy Mapping
After completing the interviews, I began to cluster insights on an empathy map in order to understand our members’ mental model. Through the process of creating an affinity diagram, an astounding tapestry of paranormal and spiritual experiences began to emerge. Most importantly, I was able to ascertain the pain-points that our members faced and identify potential opportunities to improve on these issues.
Define
Personas
Usability best practices state that the ideal number of interviews for a single persona is at least eight to twelve participants. Since we only had six people to interview, I decided to create two proto-personas instead of a single persona. I created proto-personas in order to help our team focus their decisions on which features to prioritize.
Story Mapping
I ran a story mapping exercise in order to achieve a narrative complete feature set so that we could deliver a satisfactory MVP. Originally, the story mapping was completed using newsprint paper and sticky notes. Once everything was mapped out I began to import all of the content into Airtable.
User Stories
After story mapping, I imported all of the user stories into Air Table so that I could facilitate a backlog grooming session. During this session, we organized the stories into releases, assigned design, and development story points and then used the MoSCoW method to prioritize stories within releases.
Develop
User Flows
Since I had a clear idea of what I wanted the design to look like, I used user flows in order to capture the interaction design of each feature.
High Fidelity Mockups
I created high fidelity mockups in order to communicate how features should be implemented to the development team.
Challenges
A big challenge in building personas for this project was that we only had a few people to speak with. Typically a good persona is generated from interviewing around a dozen people. However, in our case, we were only able to speak with fewer than ten individuals.
