Monday, November 16, 2015

Week 12B

WEDNESDAY


There was no class today since we would be meeting again in the classroom for the UX meeting. I decided it would be time worth spent to get work done in the classroom during class time. In class I spent my time recreating my style tile and project plan. I needed to change my color palette since the previous version had looked like a project I've done in the past. I wanted to reflect the colors of the Arc of Lancaster County. 

Below is Version 2.0 of both the project plan and style tile.



After talking to my professor he had made some suggestions to fix my project plan and user testing style tile. For example he explained that I would focus on a more cohesive color palette that uses colors as primary and secondary levels. From the previous project plan I changed the following items. 
  • No italic fonts
  • Change of color scheme
  • Increased line spacing 
  • Button and links to be viewed as similar components
  • Changed Webpage Grid to Webpage Wireframes
  • Changed A and B days to M and W to represent Monday and Wednesday
  • Added rule lines to separate M and W in the weeks.
  • Took out the color black.


WEDNESDAY - OUTSIDE OF CLASS


UX Meeting - Lancaster General Health
Room 206 from 5:30 to 9:00 p.m.
Group: Kelly, Ty and Andrew

Challenge:

Create a solution to the grappling problem of patient not understanding the type of care that is appropriate for them in the moment of difficult. Currently, too many patients feel the need to go to the Emergency Department for conditions that could be better treated at a primary care. By directing patients in the right direction they can reduce the hazardous traffic flow at the Emergency Department. The challenge is to design something, that gets patients to the right place in the right time when they need care.

Guidelines:

The solution does not need to be a piece of technology, it could be tangible or anything. We could use our resources at our disposal such as asking Nicole Brennan and Justin Kunle questions about Lancaster General Health if we are confused or unaware of a certain subject matter.

Keywords:

After listening to Nicole and Justin present in the beginning of the UX meeting I picked up on a few keywords that could benefit my group in a great way.


  • Process Flow
  • People Flow
  • Healthcare
  • Patient Focused
  • Self-navigate
  • PVC- Primary Care provider
  • Targeted Area
Solution:

As patients are unaware of the place to receive the best health services during their time a need, we needed to come up with a way that patients could interact with the knowledge prior to the aliments that may come. We thought of taking this tangible that focuses on the different insurances and what each patient could afford and allow them to see the expensive cost, if they make the wrong choice. We ended up scratching this idea as there was way too many options for insurance companies and packages. We next wanted to break down the prospective patient into race, cultural, gender, etc. but that would be impossible to know where to send out the tangible. The idea of a tangible was thrown around often because we first thought of a magnetic but realized that most families have stainless steel fridges and they are not magnetic. The idea of a brochure was also thrown away even though most people like to hold information rather than read of their mobile devices. We then realized that most brochures would be thrown away before anyone gets to read them. There was an issue with trying to create an application due to the complexity of age groups. There is generational gaps due to technology curves and not being able to understand or use the application. It wasn't until we were inspired by preventative measures such as educating patients before the problem happens. 

We focused our solution around the idea of preventative education and informing the patient about injuries prior to the accident. An application would be difficult for someone to use if they cut their finger off but knowing where to go before the accident happens will allow for easier traffic flow to the final destination. We were reminded of commercials and advertisements and how they stay embedded in our brain, due to cathy tag lines or humorous scenarios. For example like the old lady who fell down and said "I've fallen and can't get up" has made me remember life alert. By creating a interesting catch phrase about injuries, people will evaluate their symptoms and go to the correct place based off the acronym. 

It took us a while to come up with acronym T.R.U.E. We focused the acronym based off the type of care. First is Team or your primary care provider, second is Retail for retail care, Urgent is for Urgent care and E is for Emergency. Based off the level of injury will help a patient decide where to go. The acronym would be showcased in some type of advertisement or commercial explain the possible symptoms that may arise with each situation. The commercial would explain the symptoms and say for more extended list please check your mail box for an brochure that families and babysitters could use and tuck away for safe keeping. The overall purpose of the acronym is for patients to ask themselves if this is an TRUE emergency and go through the symptoms based on the severity of the situation in order to get care at the correct location. 









Monday, November 9, 2015

Week 12A

MONDAY


Updated Version of Content Inventory

I updated the colors to reflect more of the Visual Style Tile. 



Project Plan

As of 11/9, here is version 2.0 of the UX Project Plan with completed tasks represented with blue filled in boxes. This color scheme was changed to reflect the Visual Style Tile in Week 11 - Outside of Class. In addition to the completed boxes I added background columns to represent each week and the weekend that follows. 



Resources

https://uxmag.com/articles/revisiting-proto-personas-for-executive-alignment

After reading this article, I revisited the purpose of proto-personas. The goal is to understand the targeted user by understanding their needs and behaviors throughout their everyday cycles. This is an example of a personas focusing on the goals and objectives as the Vice President of Marketing. The right hand column allows quick insight as to the level of expertise by the certain traits listed below.





Week 11 - Outside of Class

Outside of Class


Visual Style Tile

Over the weekend, I established my visual style tile to give my perspective webpage/blog artifact some personality. I focused on headings, subheadings, pull-out quotes on top of screens, rule lines, text, buttons, links and of course the color scheme. 

Inspiration for Visual Style Tile


                                   



Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Week 11B

WEDNESDAY


Inspiration for Webpage Artifact

Below is some inspiration I found off Pinterest for a possible design style for my artifact to showcase all my research and process during this user testing research project.


Card Sorting & Key

The photographs of the card sorting method are unclear and sloppy due to placement. I wanted to take this method to the next step by organizing them online. In order to show the organized cards during the card sorting method, I decided to recreate them in Illustrator. By showing the cards on-screen, you can easily identify the positioning and grouping of the cards. I have used a key to label the cards based on the functionality they serve on the website such as main navigation, pdfs, external links, etc. 



User 1 


User 2


User 3


User 4


User 5


User 6





Week 11A

MONDAY


In class, we reviewed the different types of card sorting. Open card sorting is the idea of organizing cards into groups based on the context of the card, without any help from the person who created the cards. Closed card sorting gives the user prompted groups and organizes the extra cards into the predetermined groups. We were suppose to conduct 5 open card sorting sessions with physical index cards (30-50 cards), 5 open online card sorting sessions, and 5 optional closed card sorting. I needed to pair down my cards from the 99 total items in the content inventory. I had a total of 37 cards after I sorted the most important information. I left out an excess of external links. 

Prompted Cards: I predicted my card sorting exercise would be fairly difficult. Based off the descriptions and titles of each card, most of them don't make sense. To help the user, I wrote on each card if it was a main navigational link, sub link, button, external link, etc. This way the user could have some guidance when conducting the card sorting. 

User 1 - Kelly

User 1 asked several questions regarding the content on the cards and became frustrated when sorting because they didn't make sense. User 1 thought it was helpful to make side notations about the main navigation, and sub navigations because she wasn't sure where to beginning or how to initially sort the cards. User 1 was correct in terms of the amount of content that was listed under the home and contact cards.



User 2 - Raechal

Laid out all the cards first then proceeded to organize the cards into sections. User 2 was confused of the purpose of the website since the card's descriptions did not make since. Halfway through she didn't know where to place the remaining cards. Most of the cards were placed under helpful links because there wasn't a good distinction between the pages and links. 



User 3 - Erica

For user 3, I didn't prompt the user about the extra notations and until I prompted her she was able to sort the cards easily. There was a lot of confused in the labels and wasn't sure the correct grouping to place the cards. 




User 4 - Ty

User 4 spent a while contemplating what groups to sort the cards. Similar to User 1 they needed help from the extra notation to continue sorting. User 4 also noticed nothing fit underneath the contact us group and placed zero cards in that section.  



User 5 - Amber

User 5 spent a long time reading over the cards, similar to user 2. She was pretty confident in her sorting but couldn't tell you anything about the website if she was to explain the purpose of the Arc of Lancaster. 



User 6 - Alanna

User 6 struggled to stay focused when organizing the cards because she lost patience when sorting into the different categories. Eventually, she gave up and placed everything under the Programs and Services section.



Sunday, November 1, 2015

Week 10 -Outside of Class

Outside of Class


Finished Content/Quantitative Audit: The Arc of Lancaster County



Overall Research Findings:

  • Sidebar hosts interchanging content per page. 
  • The bulleted points are represented as sub-navigational links that would work more effectively as dropdown menus under the main navigational tabs. 
  • Excess amount of external links
  • Inconsistency in labeling information. 
  • Pages contain little information. Most informational pages are external PDF pages. 
  • Broken Links
  • No contact information listed; unless you want to read the last line of the webpage. 


Final Artifact Decision: For the final artifact to showcase all my research and process. I will hand code in HTML and CSS a long scrolling webpage that I will design myself. The design of the webpage will be focused on a simplistic and clean approach. The design will reflect the overall research during the webpage testing.

UX Project Plan: 



5 Methods:

  1. Content Inventory / Quantitative Audit
  2. Card Sorting
  3. Proto-Personas
  4. Heuristic Markup
  5. Project Brief

Week 10B

WEDNESDAY

In Class

This class period was used for in-class work time to correct and find common themes or problems during our content inventory.

Research Findings
  • No drop down menus under main navigations 
  • Once you click on a tab (ex: About Us) the information you would of seen in a sub navigation under the main navigation is found on the sidebar. Also, this sub navigation can only be viewed on the sidebar of each page. This was similar across all main navigation tabs.
  • The confusing part of this navigational path is that the sidebar changes every time except for the information about events and the donation button. 
  • The donate button is listed multiple times on all of the pages. This become very excessive.
  • Every image that is a link, brings you to the image at full size. 
  • There is an inconsistency with image links. Some links are external link to webpages or just full sized images.
  • Some of the links in the sidebar on the home page are not labeled the same way that they are on the "Special Events" sidebar at the top.
  • Links for the "Special Events" tab don't have the same page heading title.
  • Some of the sidebar links take part of the work or phrase, instead of the entire title.
  • There are duplicate links for external links such as the "thearc.org". The links are just labeled differently on different pages making it inconsistent.
  • There was a lot of broken links.
  • Not all information was on each main landing page. A user would need to go to the sub-pages to read the information. This would be hidden information.