UX Design Work

CASE STUDY #1 - Sharing my first portfolio project of the Google/Coursera UX Design certification course. My challenge was to create an order tracking app for online orders. While the project wasn't sophisticated or exciting, there were valuable lessons in its simplicity.

CASE STUDY #2 and CASE STUDY #3

Google UX Design Certificate - Portfolio Project 1 - Case study slide deck [Lorri Norris].

Order Tracking App

The Problem:

When an order is placed online, shoppers have to dig through their email(s), relying on sporadic information to find out where their order is. And not every email includes a tracking number, making shoppers sign back into the retailer and find the right section just to check order status.

The Goal: The goal was to create a purposeful place to keep track of orders. The app would streamline the order tracking process so that customers have one-source-of-truth to go to when they want to check the status of multiple orders.

My Role

I designed an app that includes and tracks all orders placed online. Input for the app will come from the order confirmation data in the user’s email account(s).

Responsibilities:

User research

Wireframing

Prototyping

Design

Usability Studies

User Research

I started out as an individual who personally experiences many pain points when ordering online. I am often frustrated trying to remember when I ordered, how long it has been, where to find tracking information, and the cumbersome process of accessing that tracking information from each retailer’s site. I expected research participants to share similar frustrations - and they did! But I also learned some additional pain points which helped inform my design.

In my research, users identified the following pain points:

Having to dig through emails to find correspondence from the retailer about order status
Having to log into the retailer to check order status (and remember the password to do so)
Difficulty finding the tracking number at all
Lack of retailer communication after the order is placed
Difficulty remembering all current orders, especially when the shipments were split up
Shipment tracking information is inaccurate or hard to locate
Email correspondence from the retailer is lost in spam/junk or erratic email search function makes it impossible to find the needed information

User Stories and Personas

Mary's User Story: As a busy working mom who shops almost entirely online, I want to check the status of my online order with one click, so that I don’t have to spend valuable time searching through emails or tracking down tracking information.

Storyboard

Starting the design process

My goal was to build a “stupid simple” app for order tracking. I wanted maximum white space and the most useful, straightforward, purposeful features/capabilities (not a lot of fluff)

Designing the app

Usability Study #1

"If I order from 5 different companies, it's hard for me to remember everything. I could just go to this app and look them all up at one time. I would use this app and it would save me a lot of time sorting through emails to find my order information."

Notetaking & Observations

Affinity Diagram, Pattern Identification, & Actionable Insights

High-Fidelity Stage

Usability Study #2

From the usability study, we found that the store help was an important feature of the app. We added different ways to contact the stores using icons from the material library. This feature of the app is now really robust compared to the original intent and design.

Final Mockups

The welcome screen features different languages to choose from for the app. The first 3 welcome languages are the most common.
Even though it’s not as clean for design, each icon is accommodated with text for screen readers (such as a home icon with the word “home” above it).
Very careful use of color - I checked the contrast of the palette to ensure things could be easily read. Again, this makes the design appear simplistic, but it is highly usable.

Looking back & Going forward

What I learned:

As a writer, not a designer, this was a huge challenge. Learning Figma literally overnight wasn’t easy, but it was fun and my creative mind was reactivated after many years working outside of the fields of art, design, and photography. This project took me on a journey along each step as a user. It made me carefully consider each action and make purposeful decisions. It taught me so much about design-thinking which I now apply in many aspects of my career.