Truevolve UX Consulting

At TrueVolve, I was commissioned to evaluate the technical User Experience for their product, Scrutineer.

Requirements

Scrutineer had some unique requirements as a product. It is a security-geared application that utilises the phone camera in it's operation. This means, in general, users are going to be navigating sensitive material and will require simple operation and updated information in realtime. Questions the user might be asking include:

• What information am I accessing?
• Where will that info be sent when I leave the app?
• Can I access this information multiple times?
• Is this information being stored somewhere?

All of these questions would ideally answered using direct or indirect prompting whilst the user navigates the application.

The Process

Our initial assumptions needed to be validated with actual data, so User Personas were drafted and compared to informal interview data collected from individuals both associated and distant from TrueVolve, as well as bouncing ideas back and forth from within the team.

My assumptions regarding user's anxiety around using the application were overblown and in actuality, users were more concerned with ease-of-use, speed and versatility when taking ownership of the data (Downloading or sending the file in question). This perfectly illustrates why intuitive UX needs to be validated by research. We build products for people, not for products.

Once we had an idea of what users might need, I was able to draft wireframes in Figma and prototype the flow of the application. This important step allows alpha testers to ensure that all of the functionality specs are met whilst adhering to some flow. Even now, it's important not to get too attached to any one idea or flow, as the User Flow still needs to be validated by testing.

This process of iteration is effecetively rinse-and-repeat until all stakeholders are happy with the result. From here TrueVolve took the project onwards to a visual designer.

Reflection

I thoroughly enjoyed my time working with TrueVolve and learned a great deal from Stephen, a more experienced developer and leader. I felt my performance was functionally good, however I felt I lacked the vision in the visual design department necessary to steer the project further.

After TrueVolve, I began taking classes in visual design and product design so as to better understand the process of ideation behind a sound visual design. Two books I strongly recommend in that vein are The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and Thou Shalt Not Use Comic Sans by Sean Adams et al.