TaskU
Role: UX/UI Researcher
Duration: ~15 weeks
Skills: Figma, prototyping, UX/UI research
Overview
TaskU is a mobile application designed for users to post and pick up jobs, creating a streamlined and efficient task marketplace. Developed as a group school project, TaskU was built using Figma with a strong emphasis on user research. The design process incorporated surveys, observations, and interviews to ensure an intuitive and user-friendly experience.
The Story
This project was created for ISTE 260: Designing the User Experience. This was a semester long group project that consisted of finding a problem, developing a solution, identifying our target audience, and conducting user surveys and research.
My specific role on this five person team was being the leader and managing tasks, time, and communication. I also was in charge of the user research so I prepared the interview scripts and questions, and then wrote up the summary papers with our findings afterwards. I also did help our Figma team out where they needed it.
Find jobs & build skills for your resume.
What is TaskU?
A virtual bulletin board
Post tasks & opportunities with ease.
Connect students to odd jobs & side hustles.
User Personas/Target Audience
Generated Ideas
The Process
As a group, we brainstormed different problems and the resulting mobile application solutions that would fulfill the parameters of the project requirement. Some ideas we came up with were online ordering app, inter-RIT’s campus navigation system that shows you routes, a job posting platform for college students, and more.
We decided to go with the job posting platform as it allowed us to utilize our friends and peers as resources and subjects, and because it would allow us to explore social media interfaces.
Wireframe
We then set up a meeting to gather around a whiteboard and draw out our initial ideas. We designed the architecture of the platform, such as which links went where and what pages were accessible from the current page. We also brainstormed the potential look of some of the pages.
User Interviews
There are sites that exist that also act as a job posting platform. What sets us apart differently is that ours is catered towards college students so you must have a valid student email to sign up for the platform.
We wanted to learn from the already existing websites. To gather what people really thought about these sites, each member of our group conducting an interview with a college student to get their opinion on whether they value sites like these and what they like or don’t like about the interface and user experience of the current platforms like Fiverr, Craigslist, and Facebook Marketplace.
As the lead UX/UI researcher on the team, my job was preparing the set of interview questions that would collect the data we needed. After all team members conducted their interviews, I then wrote an analysis paper with our findings.
Low-Fi Prototype
Our next step was taking what we had learned from the interviews and starting to create a low-fi version of our product. Using Figma, we prioritized implementing the suggests that the users had such as a colorful, yet minimalistic visual interface, an easy to understand navigation flow, a rating system, and more.
User Testing
Once we had a substantial, workable amount of our prototype done, we wanted to get it in the hands of the users to see what they think before we proceeded. For this, we gave them tasks to complete on our site, and observed them completing them, taking notes of any frustrations or unclear actions. Afterwards, we had an interview with them where we asked them questions about their experience using the site.
Once again, I came up with the tasks to have the users do during the observation stage. I also wrote the interview script and the final summary analysis.
Group Final Report
Over the past semester, our group has been working hard at creating an application that is accessible, aesthetically pleasing, and utilizes good user design principles. Our prototype has undergone a series of testing and comparisons to ensure that the user interface is easy to understand and navigate.
Our target audience is college students. These users have technology knowledge, especially on mobile applications and social media platforms. Our group wanted to utilize their past experiences and bring in aspects of current social media platforms to help our users better adjust to our platform. To accomplish this, we created a navigation bar on the bottom of the screen similar to Instagram, as well as incorporated an in-app messaging system found in multiple social media platforms.
We did a series of assessments on our prototype, one being a Heuristic Evaluation that was guided by Jakob Nielson’s Ten Heuristic Guidelines. During this process, we recognized that we did not have a way to offer users help which went against Guideline #3: Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors. To alleviate this, we create a help page that the user can access by going to their profile and pressing the “More Info and Support”. While the help page is not fully functional, as the prototype itself is not an active platform, this help page still gives a glimpse of how the users could get support.
During our usability testing, we uncovered a few other pain points. One of these was the navigation flow when the user was creating an account. To move on to the next page that had the Terms and Use, we had a button labeled “Terms of Use”. However, we got some feedback from participants that they naturally did not assume this button to be the next point in the path that they would have to click, but instead an optional button they could click on if they wanted more information. To solve this, we changed that button’s label to “Next” and had the “Terms of Use” appear on the next page. This allowed our users to understand the navigation more.
Thanks to all the user testing, observations, evaluations, and analysis our group did, we were able to improve our prototype so that the user experience reflected a platform that was easy to understand and use.