Crafti
UI/UX Design
The Product
The Problem
The Goal
Crafti is a social app to share and learn exciting craft techniques nearby. It connects crafters with similar minds and nearby talented enthusiasts.
Artists/crafters with limited crafting experience need mentors and a community to learn and grow from, because crafting can be challenging, and the online resources are overwhelming.
Our goal is to connect artists & crafters with their other local community members and mentors with the same interests.
My Contributions
Research
I focused on the research plan and research methods throughout the early stages of the design process. I designed and iterated on our research plan, interview plans, questionnaires, testing plans, and synthesizing the insights from our work. To ensure we had a solid foundation, I wanted to make sure all our early research was going to signal meaningful, insightful, and data driven results for our client.
User Flow
Knowing how important the onboarding experience is, I owned the user journey and the user flow for Crafti.
Due to the time constraints of this endeavor and the amount of work that would be required to get this done, I wanted to ensure it was a seamless process for users both onboarding and navigating the app itself. This was just an early design of what could be, and I wanted the User Flow to allow for scalability.
Design Process
Empathize
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
As user researchers, we wanted to understand the user’s thoughts about expanding their social circle with people who share the hobby/interests.
Survey
A survey was conducted (using google forms) to collect quantitative data to gives us an idea about the following:
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What are most people’s hobbies?
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Number of hours the potential users practice their hobby per week.
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Number of years they have been practicing their hobby for.
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The way they like to practice their hobby, remotely, individually or in groups
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Would they be interested in being a mentor/mentee?
User Interviews
Eight user interviews were conducted based on the results of the survey, to collect qualitative data from participants and understand user pain points. The ideal participant list consisted of people who were passionate about art and craft. Below are some of our research goals:
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Are people exploring new hobbies and looking for communities to join and learn from?
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What are people lacking as they are looking to pick up or learn a new craft/hobby?
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Do people that are more experienced in their creative hobby/hobbies have an interest in mentoring others?
Key Insights
We used empathy maps to refine our understanding of our users from research and interviews.
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50% of the potential users are between ages 20-29.
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37% of potential users were students, 36% salaried employees and 17% self employed.
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More than 50% of the participants practice art and craft as their hobby.
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70% of the participants are not a part of any local community but are interested in finding a local community for their hobby.
The Who & The What?
A User persona was created from our findings which helped inform the problem at hand and begin the ideation process
"Clara is a young artistic woman with limited crafting experience who needs a mentor and community to learn and grow from because crafting can be challenging, and the online resources are overwhelming."
How might we help crafters find a community to connect with other local crafters so they can teach/learn their own craft and continue to expand her skills and knowledge base
Wireframes
After the initial wireframes were completed, a round of usability testing was done in order to gain real-time feedback and improve design decisions to ensure we were focusing on the user's experience.
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Too many text sizes
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Iconography is a little confusing
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Joining a community forum is confusing
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Not all buttons took users to the correct place
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Splash Screen "explore" is misleading
Paper Wireframes
Takeaways
This was my first time focusing entirely on a mobile design, and I really enjoyed this work. I got to be a part of a team full of people with different strengths and lean on one another. Coming from a research background and sense of comfort with interviewing, I took on that work quite naturally. However I didn't focus my time as much on the UI design and prototyping.
My Learnings
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Exposure to Scope and the amount of work that goes into mobile designs, the number of screens needed for various features, and how time intensive clean and smooth mobile designs can really be.
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Chat features will require a lot more work than I had previously anticipated.
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I wish I had taken on more unfamiliar things to push myself further such as prototyping.
