Using MURAL, Slack, and Zoom meetings, a diverse group of geographically distributed individuals, we worked together to understand, empathize, find themes, and create a Lean Canvas.
We began with a question: What does a person do when they don’t own a truck and they need something moved, delivered, or hauled away ASAP?
We created an empathy board and then grouped our ideas into themes on a cluster board.
We each come from different places and perspectives; some of us are immigrants for whom English is a second language, some of us live in large metropolitan areas, others live in cities on the East Coast and Midwest. We came together, identified a problem, and were able to find commonalities in the pain points we identified. Some of these differences created friction, which helped us wade into the sometimes choppy waters of giving and receiving design critique.
As a mass communications specialist/UX writer, I am able to exercise these skills on a continual basis. However, the nature of a geographically and ethnically diverse team presented new opportunities for ideation and decision making.
Next, we created a Lean Canvas.
These steps helped us begin to identify our target customers and their needs, as well as important business functions surrounding our product.
Next, we each carried out a 6-part design inspection of a specific competitor’s site and/or app using various methods, including VIMM load factors and Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. The slideshow below includes a small portion of our findings from our design inspections of 5 competitor sites and apps.
This project was not intended to be taken to completion, but presented us with the opportunity to practice a hands-on, highly interactive approach in UX design learning. We spent approximately 15-18 hours per week, between classroom hours and team collaboration, in addition to our full-time jobs.
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