First Foray into UX and Lessons Learnt

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To be completely honest, I launched into this project expecting it to be a lot easier than it ended up being — I had visions of designing beautiful interfaces and fun animations which is what usually delights me in using my favourite websites and services. However, I ended up with something that fell short of my expectations in its user-centricity. This is the story of what I learnt designing an app for pet owners.

Having never had a pet, I had no idea where to begin and thus had to speak with a few pet-owners about their pets in general and the problems they faced. It was difficult in the beginning to speak to strangers about a topic I knew very little about to start with but I soon found that the key to a good conversation is empathy — sharing details about yourself makes it easier for other people to open up to you because it makes it feel more like a conversation than an interview. This is also when I got a lot of the insights which I wouldn’t usually have gotten in a more rigid interview setting.

Where I began to run into problems was figuring out what features to include in the app. As I was running out of time, I decided to jump into familiar ideas instead of interviewing more users to figure out what exactly they need. I settled on the idea of a pet sitter booking app à la AirBnB, and decided to spend more time on creating a high-fidelity prototype. This misjudgement led me to miss out on important user-facing functionality such as figuring out what kind of filters users really need and extraneous options that can be excluded for a better experience.

On hindsight, I should have spent more time on the user research and delivered a prototype which albeit lower-fidelity, represents better what the final product should be. Ultimately, it is a waste of time to deliver a high-fidelity prototype on a poorly-researched product because you will likely need to go back to the drawing board anyway.

We learn by making mistakes and the past week has taught me many valuable lessons. However, this is only the beginning and I am sure there will be many more bitter pills to swallow on my way to becoming a better designer.

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