Our research and discovery phase consisted of brainstorming in the context of CraftJack's known personas.
Our UX researcher led a company-wide, cross-department brainstorm in which we identified big picture ideas for the app, listed out specific needs and requirements, called out potential risks to the project, and named any dependencies that needed to happen before moving forward. We recognized the need to hire a dedicated app engineer for the development work, and to keep on as a long-term partner for bug fixes. I participated in post-brainstorm analysis of the exercise findings with our product manager and presented the findings to our CEO and COO/Founder.
During the brainstorm, we referenced our user persona documents (created as part of a previous initiative by myself and our UX researcher). Based on the known desktop app use habits of CraftJack's audience segments, we decided to gear our mobile app towards smaller business personas–Chuck in a Truck being one of them for example–because the larger, national and franchise personas typically interacted with CraftJack through their own personal sales account manager rather than conducting lead management within the app themselves.
Once we had nailed down all the requirements, we entered the develop phase–iterating though a few rounds of wireframes and user testing.
Our UX designer and myself collaborated on building these wireframes in Sketch. We incorporated rounds of stakeholder feedback with the entire team until we got the wires to a place ready for prototyping. Onc arrpvoed by internal partners, I brought the wireframes into a functioning prototype that we used in the next step of usability testing.
CraftJack did not have a testing lab, so our UX researcher converted a conference room to have recording devices from multiple angles, device set up and a private area for moderation. Customers were brought in and participated in 1-hour sessions with the functional prototype that I built. I assisted in recording results and analyzing our findings post-observation.
Testing our prototype with actual users made us confident enough to move to the final phase of design work, and start on high fidelity comps in Figma.
I designed each screen in the app, one set of designs for iOS and one for Android. The designs were originally built in Photoshop and handed off to our third-party engineers through Zeplin, but I eventually moved the design files to Figma once that program became more mainstream. I worked on the design system directly with the engineer to achieve seamless designs and functionality across both platforms, and managed the UAT and QA phases of the project as we worked towards launch.
Once the app was built and launched, I worked with our marketing team to create content and imagery to encourage adoption of the app. This content existed in the Google Play store, the Apple App Store, on our various social media platforms, in paid advertising across multiple channels, and on the CraftJack marketing website.
