Acorn
My Role
UX/UI designer
UX/UI DESIGN
Duration
Overview
Acorn is an app where people find interesting places, buy tickets online.
4 weeks
Tools
Photoshop,Adobe XD,Maze,Figma
The Background &
Challenge
For someone who didn’t have good plans on weekend, it’s inefficient to search for inspiration on Google, because too much irrelevant information overwhelmed them. Then it takes time to find where can play activities, scanning lots of merchant’s websites. Comparing prices and choosing a suitable time gets even messier.
How might we assist people to find interesting places to pass their weekend?
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I conducted a competitive analysis on Yelp and Airbnb-local experience to evaluate their navigation, layout, and general usability to understand what problems acorn needs to solve.
The possible solutions can be:
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Making categories clear and easy to choose (lacking in yelp)
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Giving users recommendations according to their location and preferred style. (lacking in yelp)
User Research
After the hypothesis process, I conducted the four interviews and questionnaire to discover users’ motivation, needs, goals. This helped me confirm or revise the possible solutions.
Research goals are:
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Discover the process of finding interesting places.
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Understand what difficulty users might face.
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Find which tools they use to achieve their goals.
Research Analysis
Quantitative data:
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67% of people used similar apps before.
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38% of people use it more than five times a week.
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75% of people spend more than an hour searching interesting places.
Qualitative data: WHY this happening?
“I want more inspiration, I don’t know where to go.”
“The online Information didn’t update, not reliable.”
“Sometimes lack of details on the website.”
“I want to save time, always waste of time scanning lots of websites.”
“Just want to easily compare price, location.”
Reshape Problem
Statement
Conceptualization
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People need more inspiration when they are lack ideas, they are flexible when choosing where to go this weekend.
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People want to know detailed information on the merchant’s page, like pictures, menus, prices, reviews. They want to sure the merchants are trusted.
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People are willing to compare merchants before making a final decision, but don’t want to waste a lot of time.
From:
People need a platform to have a clear classification of places so that can easily choose what categories they like and get some recommendations because of a lack of ideas.
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To:
people need a platform to get some recommendations because of a lack of ideas. Additionally, they can get all transparent information and compare these factors to make sure they will did the right decision.
I created personas using the information I collected from research to represent users’ needs and goals.
User Journeys & Flows
In addition to personas, I also created User journey maps and Flows to discover the whole process when users want to achieve their goals, this helped me understand their critical pain points to generate possible solutions.
Wireframes
Based on user personas and user flows, I started to clarify four core functions:
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Search interesting places
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Save liked places
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Communicate with merchants
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Buy tickets online
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Next, I started sketching low-fidelity wireframes with the iPad. Then I use Adobe XD for my high-fidelity wireframes. A few rounds of iterations were made to how to improve the user experience.
Usability Testing
I designed clickable prototypes for the mobile version and conducted remote usability tests and discovered a lot of valuable feedbacks. According to the severity, these feedbacks were prioritized to address.
When users want to change distance, they have to go back to the home page. Besides, this filter does not suit North American Merchant Density.
Users are confused about buttons when choosing the date, it's easy to cause errors.
Animated Prototype
Final Reflections
As a UX/UI designer, this passion project is challenging and meaningful to me, it allowed me to know every step of the design process. Although I enjoyed designing wireframes and prototypes, I found the most important part is usability testing, it’s a new start of an iterative process. Listening, observing, and recording allows me to understand users’ thoughts behind their actions. Even a very small element can have a big impact on user experience. After that, it’s very crucial to consider technical constraints when designing.