Description:
Yolk provides users better online reviews of different types of places such as restaurants or museums through tag reviews.
Role:
UX & UI Designer (4-person team).
Tools:
Figma, Amazon Mechanical Turk, pen and paper.
Assignment:
iSchool @ University of Toronto (inspired by CHI 2019 student design competition and personal experience).
(Wicked) Problem:
How might we redesign the online review system so that it reflects local businesses’ niche offerings, and make it easy for consumers to find and contribute detailed reviews?
Main research findings:
1. Star reviews don’t tell consumers what’s actually good about a certain place.
2. Finding places that match consumers’ values or personal taste is difficult.
3. Low star ratings can easily affect businesses’ reputation esp. for new customers.
Solution:
Using tag reviews instead of star reviews in a mobile app. Tag reviews are essentially #hashtags describing a place and/or what it offers. For example, McDonald's can be described as #familyfriendly or #fastfood. A low-fi illustration of the review process below:
Research Process Overview
Ideas that shaped our approach
1. Wicked Problems:
Online reviews is a wicked problem, meaning that it is a big and complex problem that can not be solved permanently due to the changing factors that make up that problem (e.g. technology used, government policies, user participation…etc.).
2. Maslow's hierarchy of needs:
In our current environment (North America and specifically Toronto), both consumers and businesses are not ‘in it’ just for the exchange of goods. For long, businesses aimed at fulfilling consumers’ psychological needs such as prestige through high-end or exclusive goods and services. Through secondary and primary research, we posit that businesses and consumers are now in self-actualization stage, in the look for meaning, causes and values beyond the goods exchanged (e.g. fair-trade, climate, family, local…etc.)
3. Quantifying the human experience:
Star reviews work. To some extent. The main problem lies in the inability of star reviews to capture the details and variance in ratings, which are especially important if the majority of reviews are of the same rating. For example, 49% of businesses on Yelp have 5 stars, while 19% have 4 stars. If most businesses are rated almost similarly, then what is the difference? How much is it going to take the user to understand what the business is all about?
More on my role
This was a 4-person team project which required us to divide labour. I was the main team member responsible for product thinking & UI design, whereas another team member led our research (recruiting, interviews & surveys).
Main tasks I’ve done:
1. Problem identification & critique
2. Ideation: applying tag reviews idea inspired by a note-taking app I am building
3. User interface & visual design (Figma)
4. Prototyping (Figma)
5. User-testing with Amazon Mechanical Turk.
After research & ideation, one of my teammates and I completed our first set of wireframes. He came up with a sketch of visualizing my tag reviews idea through a bubble chart.
Reflection
1. Second order thinking
Good design is preceded by deep thinking. Agile and Lean can be misunderstood to promote moving quickly for the sake of speed. There are several times my team and I needed to slow down and think hard and deep about what exactly we are doing and why.
2. This is not meant to be final
Final, extraordinary and absolutely perfect! I mean I don't know how many million times I've had these words ringing in my head. I consumed lots of online articles, books, videos, movies, podcasts about working iteratively and not getting stuck overthinking decisions, but there's still room to grow.
3. The real benefits of UX Engineering
A fully functional prototype is just better than a Figma/InVision prototype. Initially, I doubted its benefits, but testing with users esp. ones recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk, it is much harder with a Figma prototype as I have seen with test participants. This is especially important to consider when testing new ways of doing things.
4. Measuring UX
Given that Yolk deals with a social problem, it needs to be deployed in real life to measure its success and impact.We conducted usability testing on the design, but if the product is shipped, we would need to adopt other frameworks such as the HEART framework, WCAG and other social impact frameworks such as Value Sensitive Design to measure the UX and product success.