Corona Diaries
Role
UX Designer
Timeframe + Deliverables
8 days
Paper + Clickable Mobile Prototype
Key Methods
Lean UX
User Research
Problem
The Corona Diaries test site is a platform where users can record and listen to audio recordings from people around the world on their experiences during the Coronavirus pandemic. The business is interested in ways to scale their product and allow for different usage of the open source journalism data being collected.
Solution
A mobile app that allows users to listen to, record, and save stories, ultimately encouraging usage of the voice data being collected on the platform.
Discovery
Business Needs
The current features do not encourage engagement with the voice data collected from the application.
User Needs
Users are recording, listening but not truly making use of the information they collect.
Hypothesis
By adding a feature to help users categorize and save voice data, we will achieve better engagement with the data.
I used mind mapping to find the right questions to ask users to uncover how to encourage engagement of Corona Diaries’ voice data.
Research
I conducted a total of 15 user interviews, recruited through social forums and personal networks.
Ideation
I sketched features, and iterated on the sketches after conducting user testing on the initial drafts.
I created users flows that maps the user’s capabilities from the home screen to viewing their saved collections.
Prototype
The key features
Bookmark collections: Users are able to bookmark posts for later keeping, but have to put the posts into a collection that they’ve created, likely to correspond to personal projects or specific global events.
Memories: There is a page dedicated to a user’s past posts. This differs from the library of diary entries included in the profile page as ‘Memories’ are directly tied to a specific calendar day and global event. The user can then see a “This Day in History” database of all recordings of that specific day in history.
Resolution + Next Steps
In the spirit of Lean UX, our class was tasked with rapid prototyping and conceptualization of a product. As an overview, my take, now named Global Diaries provides users with the ability to see what they save, because the categorization of voice data allows for further engagement of the things we forgot we collected in the first place. Going forward, there is a need for more usability testing, and more thorough processing of each step. The culmination of this first project highlighted strengths and uncovered room for improvement, both of which I am proud to have learned.