The Challenge

The Task

Slack believes that adult students, in particular, bootcamp students have specific needs when using the app.

The goal of the project was to design 2–3 new features in the Slack mobile app that would cater to the needs of adult bootcamp students.

Our Approach

Research Goals

We conducted user interviews to research the needs of the target audience — adult bootcamp students. The interviewees were students at General Assembly who were either currently in a bootcamp or had graduated in the past year.

We wanted to find out:

1. how students use Slack

2. Pros and cons about the app

3. mobile platform use behavior

Common Themes

1. Ordinary Functionality: 

Serves similar functionality to other messaging apps

2. Good for communicating/sharing info: 

Good for discussions and communication between instructors and students

3. Channels foster community: 

Channels feature helps to foster community by keeping members in the loop about building, GA, and local events

4. Required to use Slack: 

Use Slack because their workplace/school requires it

5. Mobile App Use:

Mobile used infrequently — just for quick updates

6. Poor Mobile Usability:

Less intuitive than desktop, notifications do not always work, requires re-authentication (4 participants)

7. Better Usability on desktop 

8. Developer Needs: 

Needs better integration with developer/design apps

Empathizing with the User

Meet Nick

Nick, a representative of our target user, is a 27 year old NYC resident currently enrolled in the Software Engineering immersive bootcamp.

“I love being active in the GA community, but my busy schedule sometimes keeps me out of the loop. I try to be very efficient with my work and team projects so that I have more time for both work and play.”

REVISITING THE PROBLEM

How might we improve the lives of bootcamp students by helping them to better reduce clutter, to stay informed, to save time and to easily find the tools they need for their specific discipline by using the mobile app for Slack?

My Design Approach

Proposed Features

Using data from my research we were able to propose features to address bootcamp students’ typical needs, goals, and pain points when using the mobile Slack app.

1. Priority Alerts to improve communication

   1. enable users to make sure they read most important notifications (from instructor or project teams)

   2. reminders until message is read

2. Taskbar to improve mobile app navigation

   1. link to the app’s major features

   2. Notifications feed, linking to notification and Priority Alerts menu

3. Design Mode

   1. Sketch Board

   2. Code Editor

Mid-fi Wireframes

PRIORITY ALERTS

TASK BAR

DESIGN MODE: Sketch Board

DESIGN MODE: Code Editor

Usability Tests

To test the usability of my design, I created paper sketches, that I then uploaded to the Marvel app and tested with bootcamp students. I created three scenarios and four tasks that each participant had to complete.

Features Tested

1. Communication — Priority Alerts

2. Mobile Usability — Task Bar

3. Collaboration b/w Developers & Designers — Design Mode

Results

Results varied, but 75% of participants were able to complete the tasks either directly, or indirectly.

Feedback

1. One participant had trouble understanding the icons I used to locate different menus or screens.

I believe this was due to the low-fidelity of the sketch, as well as the location of the Design Mode icons.

In the mid-fidelity wireframe, I moved the Design Mode icons to the top right corner of the screen and increased their size to improve their visibility and findability.

2. One participant also thought there was too much text in the Priority Alerts menu.

• I addressed the Priority Alerts menu issue by adding dividers between each setting in the mid-fidelity wireframe.

Retrospective

Next Steps

The next step would be to create prototypes of the mid-fidelity and high fidelity version of the redesign app in Invision and conduct additional rounds of usability testing.

The feedback from that would then be used to further revise the feature designs and create another iteration of the above features.

Final Thoughts

This project provided significant insight into the research part of the UX process.

It demonstrated the importance of testing designs directly with users before going through with the final execution of a design.

While designers may have their best interests in mind, only users truly know what their needs are.

The better we can address their needs, the more useful our designs will be to our users.