Discover Tim’s real-company project during our UX/UI Design Course. From the initial concept, user research, testing, and more, he progressed to his finished project.
About Tim
Before joining UX Academy, Tim transitioned from a front-end developer to product design. This aligned with his degree. However, he decided to return to the fast-paced digital industry and chose UX design. This was due to his previous experience and interests.
UX/UI Design Project Portfolio: Trading Skills
Trading Skills is an app where you can exchange your skills based on your needs. You earn hours by assisting others, and then you can use these earned hours within the app.
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.
The app’s step-by-step process lets you create an ad specifying the skill you need, where, when, and for how long.
User Personas
Our team conducted interviews to create User Personas, which included “Adila” aged 31, and “Jeff” aged 40.
We asked a series of interview questions about housework, chores, how they locate trades people etc. Also, we wanted to gather information on if they thought the app would help them.
Jeff and Adila is a reflection of the interviewees as they’re in the age range 30-40. Both personas do not know many trades people and find it difficult to trust them. They usually have a hard time finding new trades people unless they were recommended by friends or family.
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.