UX Awards Shortlist

The Team
The Creative Team specialise in UI & UX design helping start-ups take concepts right through to final product.
They are involved in all projects from planning stages right through to the final launch of products and the team’s expertise combines artistic ability with technical proficiency to design and create new research and technologies. In addition to this, as part of their on-going research, the team are exploring new developments in Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Technologies where CDU are currently researching on applying UX process to AR & VR.
 
The Project
The client wanted to create a platform to help users identify which financial platform best suits their needs. To achieve their concept of effortless updates, the user experience needed to be quick, smooth, highly intuitive and flawless.
The challenge was to find the sweet spot of the client’s business goals and technical feasibility with the Users Experience as priority throughout the design process. The high volume of information required that was to be relayed from API’s to the end user in this app was remarkable. For example, the team needed to track a simple transaction on a user’s account, the address and map of the store a transaction was processed in and allow the app to automatically recognise the recurrence of these purchases and spending habits.
To achieve all of this in one app, the CDU Team applied their UX Process:
We started with the “Kick Off” working closely with the client, holding requirement gathering workshops. These workshops involved figuring out the requirements, business goals and user goals of the project. This phase would help us answer the following questions.

• Why we’re doing it?
• Who is the project for?
• What are the KPIs?
• What’s the initial idea?

The goal of this phase is to align everyone’s understanding of the project and what is expected of them. The gestures and movements being applied to the user journeys would help our client get a full sense of how the project would evolve into a final product. From here we moved to the “Collect” stage where we gathered data on the project:

• What data is available?
• What data are we looking to collect?
• Where do we go to get that data?

Such data would involve research into our users and who they are, what the API’s are and what information was available to us from the API’s as well as product feasibility by researching the financial market to see if it was a viable product.
 
Figure 1 Screen Mock-Up’s of App
Creative Inputs
Rather than jumping into solving a problem programmatically we can define a solution to work from. This could be a working prototype or a design doc with all the assets you need. It was at the “Prototyping” stage that the CDU team applied all the ingredients from their design process to intelligently apply their creativity to lo-fidelity, basic click through wireframes up to a high-fidelity, fully functioning click-through front end developed prototypes. The following were the outputs:

• Create wireframes of our idea. Building a prototype.
• Testing the prototype with users and stakeholders.

The goal of this phase is to gain user input, identify issues, and validate our ideas, assumptions, and decisions. Most importantly we should be able decide whether we need to pivot or continue with our solution. From here we will validate the results of these findings, we can then move on with the build or may need to change some elements to prototype again.
 
Fail Fast, Succeed sooner – The CDU motto.
]]>