Inside Cohort 1, Week 3: a Halloween party, a fitness app, and where people expect to find things

Week 3 of our Beginner UX (AI) Design course covered three things: user journeys, information architecture and an introduction to usability testing. All three answer one question: does the product work the way people expect it to?

A journey map starts before the app does

A customer journey map shows the steps a person takes towards a goal, and how they feel at each one. Natalia showed two classic examples from the Nielsen Norman Group: someone buying a car after moving house, and someone switching mobile plans to pay less. The car journey doesn't start in an app. It starts with a need, or an advert, or a friend's opinion. Her point was that the stages before someone opens your product are part of the journey too. Each stage has pain points, and each pain point is an opportunity. She called opportunities the fun part, because that's where the team gets creative.

How Natalia built the famagic journey

Then she showed the journey she'd drafted for famagic, built on the persona from Week 2: a parent carrying most of the family's mental load. It runs from "find a better way to organise family life" to a calmer, organised family in six stages. She told the students that four or seven stages would be fine too. A journey map is a team decision.

What was useful was how she got there. She doesn't have two young children, so she didn't know what that family's week looks like. That's normal, she said. You'll often design for lives you don't live, like a dog-walking app when you've never owned a dog. A few years ago, she said, you'd have joined parenting forums. This time she used an AI chat to sketch a typical week: school runs, nursery, the GP and dentist, weekend activities, meal planning, laundry. One thing she hadn't thought of was personal time, for each parent and for the couple. Then she put those activities into famagic and used the app for a few days, the way the parents would.

The real test was a scenario. Natalia pointed out that adding one swimming lesson and stopping there isn't real life. So she wrote one: the family's invited to a Halloween party on Saturday afternoon. By Tuesday evening someone has to think about costumes for four people, snacks, spare clothes, the address and when to leave. On the calendar it's one slot. In practice it's a to-do list, and someone has to own each item. That's the gap a family organiser can close. And once it works for a Halloween party, the same pattern works for birthdays and holidays.

The teams then copied their own personas and journeys onto a shared Figma board to compare them with hers.

Information architecture is about where people look

Information architecture (IA) is how content is grouped, labelled and connected so people can find what they need. Natalia framed it as three questions a user is always asking: where do I find what I need, what does this category mean, and what do I do next? Developers talk about architecture too, but they mean the back end. Here it's what the user sees and taps.

Good IA lets people move around a product with confidence and come across new features. Navigation is also a way to steer people. Natalia's example was Instagram changing its main navigation to push shopping. On mobile there's less room, so labels need to be short. But the labels should match across devices, because people switch between phone and laptop and expect things to be in the same place.

Two quick exercises: card sorting and tree testing

Natalia explained card sorting briefly, then had the class do it. Each student got the same set of features for a fitness app and grouped them however made sense to them. In the open round they named their own groups. In the second round the main sections were already fixed: workout, nutrition, progress, community and profile.

The results showed the point straight away. Some put community inside profile, others made it a section of its own. Challenges went under workouts for some and under community for others, which makes sense if they're challenges with other people. Weight tracking split down the middle between workouts and progress. People have different mental models, and you're looking for the pattern where most of them agree. A card sort with one group of people doesn't carry over to another, either. Age, country, device and past experience all change the answers.

Tree testing works the other way round. You show the navigation and ask where people would go to do something. The class tried it on a clothing shop with tasks like reordering trainers, finding running shoes, tracking a delivery and returning a jacket. Delivery tracking was a good example. In the shop's structure it sat under help and support, but most of the class went to order history. When most people look in the same wrong place, Natalia said, you move the content. Fewer levels are better, and things people do often belong at the top.

Students can run both methods for real in UXtweak, either moderated or unmoderated.

Usability testing: you are not the user

The last part of the class introduced usability testing. You watch real people try to complete real tasks and see where they struggle. Natalia's reason for doing it is simple: we aren't the users, so everything we think before testing is an assumption. With experience you start to spot patterns, she said, but she still tests.

A test needs three things: a facilitator, a task and participants who match the persona. For famagic's first release that means parents. Grandparents, childminders and babysitters can come later. A rough guide is five participants, which by Nielsen's rule of thumb is enough to surface most problems. Unmoderated tools give you patterns at scale. Sitting with someone shows you things you didn't know to look for: the hesitation, the surprised face, the tap in the wrong place. Use the same script and the same wording with everyone, because how you ask a question changes how people behave.

She also explained the difference between a goal and a task scenario. "Book an appointment" is a goal. "Book a physiotherapy appointment for your 11-year-old son, after school, and he finishes at 2pm" is a scenario. Two lines give the participant all the context they need without telling them where to tap.

Her last point was why numbers matter. UX isn't UI. The job is to improve things, not decorate them, and task success and time on task are how you show that something got better. Sometimes that evidence points away from what a stakeholder believed, and that's exactly when you need it.

The rest of the week

The teams are updating their journeys, picking one important flow in famagic, and writing three to five tasks for a usability test with five parents they recruit themselves. Natalia asked them to try one more thing: before a participant taps a navigation item, ask what they expect to find behind it. She has her own questions about the current navigation and wants to see whether real parents share them. Then come card sorting and tree testing on the app's structure. Natalia ran this week's mentor sessions herself, with a usability testing workbook for each team.

Next week the teams bring what they found and start improving the flow they tested.

Want to try this week's methods on a product of your own? Our card sort, tree test, journey map builder and usability test script generator are free. For more depth, read our guides to information architecture and usability testing. Or see what's in the Beginner UX (AI) Design course.