Time Crumbs is a creation that started from the realization of how much of a demand there is for services needed to assist the current market of freelancers. There are 57 million Americans in the freelance economy, we could surely come up with an application that could make an impact on current issues that freelancers may face in their day to day lives.
• How might we help freelancers track their time?
• Can we help them figure out how much to charge an hour?
• Does budgeting need to be a part of this equation?
UX Team: Kyle, Natalie, Myself
IOS Developers: Landon and Austin
Quality Assurance: Mallory, Lyndsi and Eric
Project Manager: Ryan
• Primary Research
• Interaction Design
• Usability Testing
• Wireframes and Prototyping
• Visual Design
• 6 week deadline to have app posted to the App Store.
Prior to beginning our research, we came together as a team to plan out how our day to day schedules would be set from start to finish to ensure every member was always included into the project.
Brief overview on what each part of the team is currently working on or in the process of getting done, along with a list of tasks that need to be completed.
QA, Designers and Developers would join forces and use this time to hash out any road blocks in the project, questions or concerns. Sharing deliverables during these meetings and inquiring feedback with the team was crucial.
Staying organized while also keeping in touch with each member of the team was going to be the make or break factor on us completing our app by the deadline. Jira was our agile teams helping hand in managing all types of work and monitoring productivity.
It was time for the UX Designers to shine. We needed to narrow down our brief questions and find our main focus for the app. Our approach for gathering research was to use an online survey and conduct interviews to learn how freelancers operate in their day to day lives. Creating a list of assumptions freelancers may have about their current work experience was our resource for generating questions for the surveys and interviews.
Discarding questions to get our final list proved challenging. We had to evaluate each question carefully to determine which ones we wanted to include. For more help, we reached out to our QA team to get their input and see whether they had any new ideas or suggestions. After a brief meet up we conducted a process of elimination along with revision to have a distinctive list of questions ready to be sent out. Generating a shorter list of questions creates a timely experience for our participants and brings in more results when the survey isn't long and overwhelming.
One great thing about online surveys and interviews was the ease of finding participants and the time efficiency, which was another reason we chose this method for our research process. Being surrounded by staff and students all day was the perfect environment for us to collect the data we needed. Each member of our team (UX, QA, and Developers) shared our survey link to friends, family, staff and Slack groups. While we waited for responses it was time for the UX team to split up and get interviews done individually.
Interviews were a success and we were able to conduct 8 total and I personally conducted 3 and our online survey yielded 32 responses. Here are a few of our findings.
We parsed through our interview and survey results to group patterns and like information to form our fictional representation of our ideal customer. Creating our user persona was useful in identifying exactly what users need from the product we would be designing.
A Friday Sprint Meeting was held the next day where we shared our User Persona and research collected with the Product Manager and team. Based on our findings our Product Manager found that a time tracking application with a simple design would be our Minimum Viable Product. He expressed he would like to include more features such as resources for freelancers to assist with pricing rates, Siri integration, exporting data as a pdf and payment reminders/ invoice reminders. But with the deadline getting closer everyday these additional features would be stretch goals and we would need to discuss with the developers what features they believe could be implemented with the allotted time period.
Mapping out what features were going to be included in our MVP gave us clarity on how we wanted to structure the mobile application. We wanted to see what our users would be doing with our product front and center. We all started mapping with sticky notes on the wall and Natalie created a final draft in Sketch.
Before proceeding to our Site Map we took time to sit down with the developers to review the User Story Map. This was a beneficial way to see what was buildable. After a long discussion we decided to exclude the payment reminders and rates. The Devs said they would need to pull data from a reliable source to include the rates into our application, this would be a time consuming task and wouldn’t be sure if they could fit this into the time frame along with creating a payment system for the app.
Prior to sketching we decided that over the weekend each member of our UX team would do a little homework. Mondays goal was to come back with sketches of each page while using our site map as a guide. Saturday and Sunday I took time to find improvement opportunities and get more ideas to produce a wide variation of sketches. Using Apples Human Interface Guidelines was a fundamental tool in creating a seamless design on an Apple platform.
Time to move onto low fidelity wireframes and user onboarding screens. Splitting the work load in Sketch was the best way to keep us all involved. I worked on the log history page and the dashboard page. Completing the low fidelity wireframes before the end of the day was our goal since we wanted to upload to Invision and get testing as soon as possible. Designing and working next to each other along with staying in the same room as the IOS developers was an easy way to catch mistakes, give each other feedback, and make sure we were still on track. The Devs added suggestions and helpful tips such as adding swipe features and modal popups in certain areas to make navigation easier for the users.
Our Invision prototype was ready to be tested. Receiving efficient and responsive feedback would allow us to solve any problems in our current design. Our UX team generated a task list. Participants would complete a total of 7 tasks while we document their journey through the prototype, log expectations and experience. Here are some of the feedback results received from the 7 user tests.
Constant iterations were key to making a mobile app that actually brings value into peoples lives. With every test came an iteration and the more tests we did our app showed more clarity to our users resulting in less drawbacks during usability testing.
Final stages of product launch were near as we touched up our low fi's with the Human Interface Guidelines before moving onto hi fidelity wireframes. HIG made our features more discoverable due to user familiarity with IOS products. Afterwards, we each went off and conducted usability tests and A/B tests with our hi fi's to get feedback on the style. Here are some of our iterations.
We strived for a clean and minimalistic design to attract freelancers. We opted for orange and blue for our main app colors. Orange representing success and creativity and blue pertaining to order and cleanliness. Sticking to a few colors showed balance throughout the app.
