Individual Reflection #3

This week, I learned that a pain point may contain multiple frustrations. My group narrowed down into one pain point focusing on the browsing of Instagram stories. Within the browsing of stories, there are frustrations like difficulties viewing seen stories and the inability to create multiple stories groups. As a designer, this allowed me to understand more about the need to dissect pain points as they may contain underlying frustrations since the pain point may not be the root cause of the user’s annoyance.

For the project, I was in charge of developing the wireframes on Miro. One difficulty that I faced was that I was not sure of the best methods to put certain elements on the interface. I tried to overcome this by using my contextual knowledge and following current practices of design and Instagram.

This reminded me of a case study on Apple web store that I did which emphasised on their clear visual hierarchy. With reference to the figure below, upon viewing this page, users will usually look at the image first. This is followed by the product name - iMac. Thereafter, it would be the tagline, “Say hello”, then the call to action buttons. Lastly, the user would scroll to the next section, which contains another tagline to convince the users to buy the iMac, then the same sequence repeats. Information is presented clearly without cluttering the page and supports the clear goal of the user, which is to purchase the Apple product. The different sections are segmented by colour which helps in retaining the user’s attention as information is broken up into sizeable chunks.

I am inspired and fascinated by this because while viewing the page, my eyes really followed the elements in the order that the designer intended it to be. This makes me realise that I can selectively show the order of information to users by taking note of their hierarchy, sizes or segmentations. Especially with the short attention span of most users, having the most important information at the top of the hierarchy would be very important to bring my message across. Hence, I came up with a wireframe like the figure below.

Upon reflection, I realized that navigation flow is also very important. Even though the wireframe was non-interactive, I had to consider navigation flows, possible screens needed, or possible buttons users would click. This also includes user flows or edge cases such as having no search results. I now understand better the reason why designers would create storyboards or navigation flows before creating wireframes and prototypes. I also found it interesting that we possibly managed to solve a couple of frustrations with a small change such as the inclusion of a button. This makes me realize how much thought goes into user experiences in applications. In the future, when I think of implementing changes that may disrupt users’ normal flow, I will think twice and validate with users because disruption may not be the best option.