See how Tim went from the initial concept, to user research, testing, creating storyboards and more until he got to the finished project. Tim’s project is one of the many innovative and creative ideas our students have developed while they have been at UX Academy. If you would like to develop your own UX Design portfolio like Tim, then a UX Academy course may well be right for you.
About Tim
Prior to joining UX Academy, Tim was a front end developer, that then moved into product design which was more in line with his degree. However, Tim started to miss the fast paced environment of digital and wanted to move back into this industry. Tim picked UX as he found it interesting and seemed to match his previous experience.
UX Design Portfolio: Trading Skills
Trading Skills is an app that allows people to trade skills depending on what they need. The Trading Skills application is where you spend however many hours you have earned by helping others. For example, hours spent baking a cake can be exchanged with child care within the local community or helping someone with a DIY project around the house. Following a step by step process in the app allows you to create an advertisement with what you skill need, in what location, what date and for how many hours.
User Personas
Interviews conducted by our team were used to create User Personas which included Adila age 31 and Jeff age 40.
A number of interview questions were asked along the lines of about the work required, Housework Chores, Locating tradesman/skill people/muscle, Skills of the user, Tech, Local/About User and Would the app help.
Jeff and Adila is reflection on the interviewees as they’re in the age range 30-40, both don’t know others that well other than family and friends. Have the skills to help out family members but don’t really find local traders trustworthy and hard to look for because they would only trust family and friend recommendations.
They both constantly look for people to help in terms of what skills they’re looking for so they’re both likely to use Trading Skills app to make life easier when finding people.
Ideation
We explored the initial idea of creating journey maps, mind maps, random links and creative stimulus where we considered other environments related to our users. The number of great tools helped us take initial ideas and expanding on them. What sprung out to me the most is Journey maps as it’s where to you take a persona and map out the user’s day helping to find where the situation would be useful for users.
Our Idea and Storyboard
Creating a community for personalised needs. Allowing users to reach out to the local community for help with their tasks in exchange for their time. Here our users can request help for a job and will pay in time. To gain more time the users will have to help other people in the community.
Information Architecture – Journey map
Here we used our personas and research that we had gathered to run through each task our users would go through when doing a DIY task.
User Flows
Wireframe
The sketch of wireframe allowed us to test out flow models and design them without worrying about mistakes allows you to make changes much more efficiently. The sketches on the right hand side show a rough sketch of the trading skills app in it’s creation.
Prototypes
Using Proto.io We started to move the sketches to wireframes and into a direct Prototype that could be tested. First looking at the initial Prototype by using it myself and putting together a User journey to show how the users would flow through the app, making notes and alterations from the thoughts of the rest of the class.
Whether you want to start a career in UX, or just diversify your skillset in general, UX Academy has several courses available to suit your needs. Get the chance to work on real life projects and build your UX portfolio when you join UX Academy.