How 5 students solved all of Washington’s political issues in just 10 weeks (in theory).
StateSmart
Scope
The Advanced UX Studio course is designed to simulate a real-world UX research and design process within an academic setting. My group was tasked with ideating a theoretical product (StateSmart) and then going through a real research & design process - culminating in a fully functioning prototype - with focused instructor feedback throughout.
Learning on the Fly
With only 10 weeks to learn and turn in a fully functioning product prototype for an Advanced Level UX design course, we knew it would be a challenge. And as a randomly assigned group of 5 students we had the additional challenge of overlapping skillsets and knowledge gaps.
For myself, this became an excellent way to continue developing my skills in both organization and delegation.
Moving Quickly
Another challenge created by our truncated timeline was overlapping steps in our design process. Most notably, we had to make significant edits to our wireframe prototypes while simultaneously performing moderated user tests to validate our changes.
Countering this successfully came down to our ability to maintain a precise attention to detail and open channels of communication so that we could compartmentalize the steps in our process and analyze test results that we we could be confident in.
The “Final” Results
After a whirlwind final 2 weeks of the quarter, we presented our final prototype successfully (A+)!
But while the prototype checked all the boxes required by the class, there are clear gaps and improvement areas that need to be addressed if this were to become a real-life product, most notably a comprehensive UI system and a more streamlined introductory user flow.
We were able to address some of these during a brief follow-up period, but not to the extent that would be needed for a real product.