A discovery workshop to understand our users

Overseeing design concepts from inception through implementation was a real challenge for me.

Designing a product from scratch sounds very difficult...and it is indeed! When you have to make all UX decisions, you got nervous and sometimes you are more focused on avoiding possible mistakes than thinking in possible solutions. But making decisions made me learn, being mistaken made me grow to became a better UX Designer. That's the way in UX Design: if something doesn't work you always can iterate to improve it and so on.

User research: Customer Journey workshop.

Before starting prototyping with no sense, me together with some members of the team had the opportunity to travel to The Circular Lab located in Logroño (La Rioja, Spain) to participate in user research activities and create a Customer Journey to be able to iterate design solutions based on customer data.

The aim of these workshops were to collect information about our different type of audiences in order to create a product which satisfied all their needs.

While we were preparing all the stuff, the first group of users (around 15 people) were having a coffee, relaxing and talking to each other at the cafe. They were divided in two groups: people who recycle and who don't. We put a sticker on them in order to recognized each group.

The Customer Journey was called "The life cycle of a residue" where the users could follow all its stages: from buying a product in the supermarket (1), bringing it to home (2), taking it to the rubbish (3), putting it into the right trash can (4), garbage collection (5) and finally the recycling centre (6).

Wireframing, testing and so on.

I started to sketch low-fi wireframes on a paper because for me was way easier to begin. Sketch quick and iterate faster was my main goal in this stage of the project.

So, once I had the main structure (navigation menu, header and footer) I started to digitalize and translate the sketches into hi-fi wireframes.

I worked really close with both visual design and development team to ensure that UX implementation was done properly.

Every morning, after a hot cup of coffee, my main task was to test the new update in the SmartWaste testing environment. In this way, I truly knew the state of the product, what I had to improve, which features were implemented and next steps.

Once I had the first version closed and validated with the Product Owner, I started to create UX documentation such us interaction and visual specs.

Smartwaste in the news

Some links that you might like to have a look:

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Cinco dias (in Spanish)