How to improve the user experience of MS Teams mobile app onboarding.
Critical analysis
Week 4
Justification of choices made when selecting specific user experience methods and processes during the development of a solution to MS Teams onboarding experience problem.
“It’s not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and yes, beauty to people’s lives.”
Don Norman
We focused on analyzing our choices to improve the user experience of Microsoft Teams’ onboarding, specifically regarding the help and learning options. We carefully reviewed and assessed the enhancements we implemented to ensure they met user needs and expectations. Our goal was to create a seamless onboarding process that guided users in understanding the application. By evaluating the effectiveness of our help and learning features, we aimed to refine and optimize the onboarding experience further.
Final Prototype
Our final prototype contains series of solutions aimed at providing users with an improved onboarding experience in Microsoft Teams. The key features of our prototype include:
1. Users have the option to either go through the onboarding process or skip it and explore the application on their own. This allows for flexibility and caters to different user preferences.
2. We have focused on making the help and learning options easily accessible to users. This ensures that users can easily find guidance and support whenever needed during their interaction with the application.
To inform our decision-making process, we relied on a variety of sources, including self-assessment, assessments from tests and evaluations, user surveys, opinions, and online research. We emphasized clear and precise communication, and if a particular function was deemed unnecessary or unjustified, we removed it.
Constructive feedback played a crucial role in our collaboration. By discussing and addressing different perspectives, we were able to find common solutions and improve our teamwork. This iterative feedback loop helped us refine our prototype and ensure that it met user expectations and requirements.
Design process plan and project management.
We adopted an agile project management approach to uncover user needs, generate quick design solutions, and conduct rapid testing. Trello served as our chosen tool for organizing our work efficiently. Our design thinking methodology centered around providing solution-oriented approaches to address users’ problems (Crady, 2018). Brainstorming sessions and paper prototyping on Miro were employed to gain a deeper understanding of user needs. Throughout the project, we emphasized the importance of showcasing and testing our ideas with real users, enabling us to refine and validate our design choices effectively.
Reflection
Our project aimed to improve the user experience of onboarding on the MS Teams mobile app.
Throughout this blog, I shared our team’s approach, following a user-centered design process and highlighting our key learnings:
- Empathize: We conducted research to understand our audience.
- Define: We identified problems based on user needs.
- Ideate: We brainstormed extensively to find solutions.
- Prototype: We developed a paper prototype.
- Test: We tested our ideas.
While I wish we had more time to test our solutions, I believe we made significant efforts to provide users with the best experience on this application. Ultimately, the success of our solutions can only be determined by the users and further testing.
After four weeks of dedicated work, understanding our users, and providing them with optimal solutions, I am curious about exploring and testing other approaches, such as building an app based on mental models to enhance usability (Joyce, 2020).
Key learnings from this week include:
- effectively demonstrating, comparing, and testing design ideas,
- recognizing the value of design critique for successful collaboration, consciously iterating on prototypes for future testing,
- acknowledging that user-centered design is an iterative process,
- utilizing brainstorming sessions to find the best solutions for user needs based on usability test analysis.
Overall, this project has provided valuable insights and takeaways that will inform my future design endeavors.
Other learnings and takeaways
References
Crady, A. (2018). Doing the right things and doing things right: a design researcher’s process model. https://uxdesign.cc/doing-the-right-things-and-doing-things-right-a-design-researchers-process-model-abd222699bbf
Joyce, A. (2020). Mobile-App Onboarding: An Analysis of Components and Techniques. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-app-onboarding/#:~:text=We%20define%20onboarding%20as%20the,also%20completing%20any%20necessary%20setup.
