Design Challenge #3

This weeks design challenge is from https://designercize.com/. See prompt below:

I am treating this week’s challenge as a whiteboard challenge and capping myself at 15 minutes.

For starters, I know the target audience is single parents. In an interview, I’d ask more questions about their pain points, what type of single parent’s they are aiming to reach or is it all single parents in general? (i.e. parents that are still in school? Younger parents? Parents looking for books for themselves or for their kid(s)?). I’d also ask more about how they currently go about searching for books, when do they typically search for books? etc, I’d use the interviewers as a primary research resource in an attempt to build a persona. For the sake of this exercise, since it’s just me, I’m keeping it as broad as possible, so the User persona for this exercise is the following:

Michael, a 23 year old single father, who is looking for a self-help book on how to be more patient. (So, the general audience I am aiming for a younger parent who is looking for a book for themselves). Typically he searches for books in his downtime, so early in the morning, or late at night, after he puts his daughter to bed.

After establishing the person, I have a pretty good idea of their needs. For this exercise, the user needs are the following:

-a simple results view that provides them with the book title and author, number of stars out of 5 it has received, and a quick synopsis on the book. It will also provide an option to buy or rent the book for delivery or to buy/rent as eBook.

User Goal:

After establishing my person, I’m able to pull out a user goal: Single parents should be easily able to search for books on an app that is secure and simple.

Assumptions:

• Single parents only have downtime in the mornings or at night

Constraints:

Sketches:

I finished my last screen with just enough time to spare. During this process, because the time limit was shorter than normal, I felt extremely stressed. You’ll notice my constraints section is empty. I know it’s import to identify any constraints you may run into during these challenges and to ask the interviewer to play the role as an engineer/product manager to ask about constraints before designing, but because I was so focused on the persona and getting the sketches done, I missed identifying these constraints entirely for this challenge. Maybe it’s due to lack of details for the challenge, but it’s something I want to focus more on for my next challenge. In addition, I forgot to create a user journey and jumped right into sketching, where I felt very rushed / overwhelmed. I also jumped into a “filter” results view rather than a “Search” results view, where the user would filter by criteria, instead of just searching for a key word. Long story short, I felt out of control for this challenge and totally bombed it. Now that I’ve been able to pull out my weaknesses for challenges on a shorter time constraint, I can keep working to improve them.