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christine forni
ux + UI design
The end goal of this project was to develop a GUI for what is currently a command-line data scraping tool. The creators had very little information going into the project, so there was a lot of preliminary research to complete before beginning to design. I worked on a team of four whose primary focus was on tech novice humanities researchers.
We began by conducting interviews with the creators and developers of MassMine, then with real humanities researchers who would ideally use the software once the GUI was created. We each posed our own questions to the creators/devs, then ran our own interviews with researchers we had individually reached out to.
After collecting that preliminary research, we compiled the main points from the creators into design principles for our GUI. We used our interviews with the researchers to develop a persona we could refer back to throughout the design process, to make sure we were truly designing with our user in mind.
My team and I drafted multiple sketches of screens and screen flows, then came together to combine the best of our ideas. We spent a lot of time discussing which elements to include, how to simplify and refine our ideas, and which flows made the most sense. I did the final drafting of our combined sketches.
Once we had the sketches finalized, we split them amongst ourselves and used Figma to mock them up. I went in and made sure that they all stylistically matched in terms of color, line, font, and spacing. We then held a black hat session with our peers, which allowed us to gain critiques of our designs and to see other perspectives. We took these critiques and applied them to our designs, then began prototyping them for use in testing.
Once the prototype was finalized, we set up user testing. We created scenarios and wrote our testing protocol, and each lead a testing session. Our testing included pre-test demographic questions, a series of tasks, and a post-test questionnaire and product reaction cards (shown above).
After testing we synthesized our notes for further edits to the prototype, then created a thorough report documenting the key points from our interviews, designs, and testing for the creators and developers to refer back to when needed.
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View the prototype here.
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