ChronopalIt's a socially interactive calendar app that facilitates in scheduling, managing, and sharing plans with others. The mission of this app is planning together and staying together.
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Overview
Sharing schedules and making plans together could be a very difficult task sometimes. Sometimes it can take multiple back & forth checking and confirmations. Chronopal solves such problems with it's innovative integration with social platforms. The most challenging part was to design the solution for vast demographics.
I adopted the user centered approach for this design to give it a direction and proceeded with a design thinking modal. The scope of this project was to develop a low-fidelity design. I worked as the designer of this app to research, ideate, design and prototype the initial product. |
My Role
UX Designer
Research Synthesis (Primary Research, Heuristic Analysis, Persona, Journey, Use Cases); Ideating (Task Analysis, Function Analysis); Prototyping (User Flow, Wireframes, Low-fi Prototypes); Testing (Usability Testing); |
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What's the problem?
While making plans with family or friends, it is important to check everyone's availability. Most of the time is someone is available, someone else might be unavailable. This leads in back & forth matching and mismatching of time. Even sometimes like in partners or in a office environment people have to share the schedule of some particular event. It's specially hectic for a group who has to do it every time. When a group is large and they have to schedule a particular event and have to get the opinion from everyone, it could be difficult via texting and keeping track of everyone's options. |
My Solution
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There are multiple problems mentioned and none of them are unique or unsolvable. Each of them has a solution but switching between different platforms for each problem and keeping track of every platform could
itself turn into another problem. The solution was to integrate multiple solutions in one platform and try to tackle the problem. The concern of privacy could be handled by providing the users the option to share or hide the piece of information. |
Function Analysis
To make sure each and every function could be accessed I performed a function analysis which specified the path and the steps the user will have to undertake in order to complete the task. This function analysis made it very clear if there is any redundancy in the design or any unnecessary steps. It made it easy to give shape to the whole process and also worked as a base for the whole app interface. (Function Analysis Table) |
Design process and Wireframes
Wireframes made it easy to visualize the whole app in one glance. It worked as an prototype for the prototype, giving some shape to my idea of the app. As the wireframe shows the intended interface, it was also helpful to display the information architecture of the app. |
Task analysis
The task analysis helped to analyze every possible way to perform a task and where the user might end up by making any choice of available options. The task analysis worked out with both the user aspect as well as the process going on in the background of the app. (Task Analysis Chart) |
Low Fidelity Prototype
After going through the usability test results and the feedback from the participants, there were few changes that were taken into consideration. These changes were applied in the final stage of the design and another usability |
The images above displays the interface of the various displays the app offers. From the left it has the week view, the event view, the month view, and the three day view of the calendar respectively.
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It is the architecture of the app in which we could set an event. The architecture displayed in the image is not absolute and is skipping some of the connecting pages which makes it possible to share with friends in a poll pattern.
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![Picture](/uploads/1/2/6/5/126572224/published/3.jpg?1571783380)
The image above displays the different options offered by the app, which indicates the tools, notifications, and edit event function.
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Usability Testing
For the usability test, participants were asked to perform task given by the facilitator. Once beginning the identified task, task duration was recorded by simple stop-watch. The participant were encouraged to “narrate” their thought process while completing the tasks. Once completing a task, participants completed drafted subjective evaluations, as well as respond to brief questionnaires pertaining to the completed task. The Usability Test Results had the evaluation of all the parameters and questionnaires provided in usability metrics against the pre-approved goals, subjective evaluations, and specific usability problems. Based on both the quantitative and qualitative results obtained with the conceptual design scenarios, the final prototype excluded the event-poll options. Color options were withheld to prevent confusion during participant running of scenarios. Some recommendations like, icon size was increased to 1.5 times the initial size. Additionally, icons chosen for the final design were sourced from commonly used applications in attempts to reduce icon ambiguity. |
This project is the closest to my heart. After switching my area of interest from mechanical engineering to human factors, this was my first project that I completed. Starting form scratch with no experience at all, I went on completing this project. I learned a big deal from this project and this project is the biggest reason to develop my interest in the field of user experience. The terms like persona, task analysis, usability were strangers to me, but after this project they became the basis of my future development. As a school project it was more focused on the design aspect rather than the visual appeal so, this project was not converted into High Fidelity prototype.
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