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Phase I Analyzing Users Competitors and Initial Designs
SideCause is designed to provide users looking for jobs to do and users wanting to have jobs done for them a way to connect with each other. The focus of the work done during this phase of the project was creating a way for users looking for work to browse available jobs, and to filter these jobs by personal requirements such as distance, job type, and pay.
There were several methods we used to discover new insights about improvements we could make to our design for potential users. These included analyzing potential advantages and shortcomings of competitors (such as Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace) to see ways in which our product can fill a niche our competitors may have missed, creating personas and scenarios to get an idea of who will be using our product and why, and to gain insight into potential changes we could make to facilitate easier use of our product for these users, and creating design sketches modeling the way users will interact with our interface to find areas where changes could decrease friction for users interacting with our product.
To analyze potential competitors to our product, we outlined strengths and weaknesses and the monetary cost to users for each competitor (which was irrelevant in our case, since they were all free), and gave each an overall score out of ten.
To create personas and scenarios, we started by brainstorming to determine the types of people who may be interested in using our platform. We then wrote out a detailed description of each person's motivations for using our product, and created a scenario for each showing the way this user would use our product and what they would ideally get out of the use of our product.
To design sketches modeling user interactions with our product, we drew a prototype of our user interface, and showed the way a user would go through menus to filter jobs by their desired requirements.
After analyzing our competitors, we determined that one of the main issues with Craigslist in particular was the unintuitive and frankly dated user interface for navigating through listing categories, which was something we worked to avoid in our design. Additionally, both Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist lacked ways to filter jobs by type, which in our opinion was a crucial feature to make interactions with our product easier for users. The final competitor we analyzed (JustServe) did have a feature allowing users to sort jobs by type but was only targeting users looking for unpaid volunteer work, which may limit the number of users interested in finding jobs through the platform.
Creating personas and scenarios allowed us to learn about why different types of users would want to use our product. Prior to this research exercise, we had not considered users who may want to use our product to work on projects they were passionate about (such as increasing greenery in their neighborhood) rather than using our product primarily for monetary reasons.
Designing sketches of our user interface allowed us to iron out kinks in terms of the placement of certain filtering and sorting options, such as which menu the "Filter" option should go in. Creating sketches of the user interface let us put ourselves in the shoes of our potential users, which allowed us to make changes to limit friction that we may have missed otherwise.
The main conclusion we drew from analyzing our competitors was that it is extremely important for us to allow users to filter by job type, which is a major feature lacking from competitors that could potentially fill the exact same niche we are seeking to fill.
The personas and scenarios exercise reinforced the need for a way to filter by job type for users who may be looking to work on projects they're passionate about, and a way for users to filter out jobs based on distance for one of our target audiences (university students), who may not have the means to work on jobs further than they can walk from their current location.
While synthesizing our design sketches, we determined that the filter option/button should be a separate menu accessible from the main page and not hidden within another menu. After doing the personas and scenarios exercise, we determined that this would likely be an option that would be used quite often by our target users, and having it directly on the main page would greatly reduce friction for these specific types of users.
Since our UX team consists of only two members, all the decisions we made in terms of rating competitors, creating personas and scenarios, and figuring out our design were made with a very small sample size of only two, which could have led to us missing potential user types and design elements that would have been considered given a larger UX team. In addition to this, there may be other, smaller competitors that we did not find during the exercise in which we analyzed what our competitors were doing well or poorly.