Customer & Manager Interviews

Goal: To observe the customers at McMenamins, interview the customers and employees to determine why either groups have used the app in the past, and learn about their experiences with the app.

Findings:

• Customers typically use the application for the McMenamins rewards passport.

• The app helps customers track the stamps they have collected in their physical passport.

• The rewards passport is a major component of McMenamins’ business, with over 200,000 issued.

Affinity Mapping

Goal: Organize and consolidate notes from interviews with customers and employees to highlight additional trends that can be used to better understand the goals and needs of the business and customers.

Findings: Common needs and goals for our target McMenamins customers were uncovered and used to create out user persona, and kept in mind throughout the design process.

Baseline Usability Testing

Goal: To observe users completing tasks within the original app given a specific scenario, and see how users interact with the app to uncover issues or problems they are experiencing.

Findings: The most common pain-point mentioned amongst the 6 users tested included:

• They didn’t see the value or purpose of the passport feature, specifically because:

  • The passport feature cannot be used in lieu of the physical passport.

  • The app does not officially save the passport stamps, meaning if the passport is lost or damaged, users must restart from the beginning.

User Persona

Goal: To summarize and represent the goals, needs, experiences, and behaviors of a typical user uncovered during research, so each team member has a clear understanding of our target user when making design decisions.

Result: The target user is a man in the early 30’s, Tim O’Neil, who has a typical PNW career as a software engineer, and:

• Is always on the lookout for a new adventure.

• Values social life with friends and family.

• Cares about efficiency and productivity.

• Doesn’t like redundancy or ambiguity.

User Journey Mapping

Goal: To gain insights on how to optimize the customer experience by outlining the journey our persona would take as a customer who used the previous app, experienced the key problem uncovered during research, and used the new version of the app.

Result: Some of key insights our team learned from the creating the journey map include:

• Without the new app, there is a chance that users who lose their passport would stop going to McMenamins.

• The new app needs to save the stamps, and convey this new feature to new and old users.

• Metrics to measure the success of the new app could include tracking the change in passport sales, app store ratings, app downloads, and overall app usage.

• There will need to be a marketing campaign to reintroduce the new app.

Sketching & Team Brainstorming

Goal: To work as a group to understand the problem we are trying to solve, outline objectives for the solution, make a plan of action to solve the problem, and generate several designs.

Result: Our interaction designer lead the brainstorming session, sketching various screens out, asking for our input, and clarifying any questions about the research findings. The result was a refined set of preliminary sketches taking a variety of our ideas into consideration.

Design Studio

Goal: To solve a specific problem our interaction designer was facing with regards the layout of a screen.

Result: Our team came up with 20+ screen layout designs in a matter of minutes, and we were able to quickly narrow down the best option to proceed with.

Information Architecture

Goal: To restructure and simplify the the primary navigation by understanding people’s mental models through card sorting.

Result: After completing two rounds of card sorting - one round with five participants, and one round with our group members - I was able to pare down the primary navigation from 14 destinations to five main destinations, and reorganize the the site map to incorporate these changes.

Goal: To create low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes so we can test our designs to gain user feedback early in the process, and rapidly iterate the design.

Result: Our interaction designer was able to iterate the prototype 4 times within a few days of testing and improve the design with user feedback early in the design phase.

Usability Testing

Goal: To improve the usability of the design, and validate our design solution through user testing and user feedback.

Result: We completed four rounds of usability testing with five participants per round, on our low-fidelity prototype, quickly iterating the design and improving the overall usability.

Measuring Performance Metrics

Goal: To obtain System Usability Scale Scores (SUS Scores) from each usability test, and achieve an average SUS Score above 70 by our final iteration.

Result: The average SUS Score started at 24 and increased to 70 by our second round of testing. Our final SUS Score was 78, which is above the minimum acceptable SUS Score of 70.

Visual Design

Goal: To improve the visual design of the existing app to better represent the tone and brand of McMenamins.

Result: Using existing marketing assets (shown in adjacent image) obtained during our ethnographic research, I used this inspiration to help improve the visual design so it aligns with McMenamins’ common colors and typefaces that compliment their logo and overall brand.

BEFORE