This week marked the start of the group project. In this project, we were tasked to assume the role of a design consultancy, and pick an exiting mobile/web design to evaluate and improve upon. This is arguably the most challenging phase of the group project — ideation.
This phase would be described accurately by this quote:
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling
On Thursday, my group started our ideation phase by generating dozens upon dozens of possible ideas, starting from apps we use on a frequent basis such as reddit, Outlook and Figma UI3 among many others.
We agreed that the good idea had to satisfy several criteria:
- A mobile interaction, which is the theme of the module.
- The app had to be somewhat problematic, so we had areas to work on.
- Easy to reach our target users, e.g. NUS students, so as to conduct our user reserch and testing.
- An application that we all (or at least some of us) know well, so it’s easier for us to relate to.
- As a bonus: Not too common, so we could set ourselves apart. Some ideas consistently pop up in such classes, such as MyEduRec and Canvas, and we didn’t want to go with these.
However, in our discussions, I found out that we all had dissimilar interests and used very different applications in our day to day lives. In particular, there were 2 ideas I felt strongly about.
The first idea was NUS TalentConnect. Coming from CS, using TalentConnect is essential when applying for credit-bearing internships, so I had a bit of experience navigating the platform. I felt that TalentConnect was very confusing to navigate, for example, in the screen below, the breadcrumb shows Home / Documents / Documents, but clicking on the second Documents redirects you to the current page. The same issue with the breadcrumbs reappears in multiple pages across the application.
While there exists several other issues with TalentConnect, we decided against it as most of the group was not familiar with the platform.
The second idea was the NUS Student Work Scheme portal (NSWS) for finding part-time jobs within NUS. As a user, I felt that NSWS lacked several key features, such as a better way to import timesheets. Timesheets are manually entered on the platform, with multiple different input fields.
It was a frustrating experience to enter multiple timesheets at one go, so I felt there was a lot of room to work on to improve the user experience. Likewise, this was rejected due to my group’s unfamiliarity with the platform.
Eventually, the good idea we decided on was NUS NextBus, as it satisifed most of the criteria we set out to achieve. We saw several issues with the application, and most of us had used the platform extensively before to navigate around campus, so we could relate to it more easily.