Mayv, the Online Community for People with Chronic Joint Pain

Defining the Goals

I started by asking myself the question "What are the goals I'm trying to achieve?"  From the discussions with PM, I listed the main business goals first, and then came up with design goals.

I followed that specific order because business goals provide a guideline for design goals, and can make sure I'm not designing for the sake of design itself.

The 4 Steps Testing System

Then I moved on to the research of available UX research methods and identify which ones are most suitable for the current product development stage, and most valuable for meeting the goals. Ultimately, I decided on the following UX research methods:

Specifying the Flow and Adding Administrative Details

Upon settling with the UX research methods, I flashed out the entire testing process of initial screening, recruiting, test scheduling, emailing instructions and confirmation, conducting interviews, recording test results, etc.

The flow chart below is a visual representation of the testing system I presented to my PM and other team members to help them understand the process and each case.

UX Research Methods and Why

Among all the available research methods, I used three that were most suitable for Mayv's current product development stage.

Prototype Testing Activities

For the prototype testing, I designed two activities to get insights on how users actually interact with the product:

• Task-based Figma prototype testing. For each user, I assigned a specific task that he/she needs to complete on the Figma product prototype. Examples include completing a guided meditation course session, posting a comment on others' posts, navigating to the profile page, etc.  
• Card sorting. I created sticky notes each listing one popular treatment for chronic joint pain, and ask the users to group them into "Most Useful", "Less Useful", and "Least Useful".

Why did I use these methods?
Task-based Figma prototype testing - To observe how real users interact with the app, therefore find out any design defect that causes confusion or difficulty to use. 

Card sorting - To gather insights on whether the current solution Mayv provides is valid and to find new solution ideas for future development. 

The User Relationship Management System

In order to keep track of the users and log corresponding testing stage progress and results, I created a user relationship management system that records each person's name, contact information, source of connection, interview status, testing result rating, and other relevant details.

With this chart, I could quickly identify who are the users with the best testing results and find relevant information as needed. It also helped me to keep a record of each person Mayv could contact for future tests.

What I Discovered

After conducting 32 interviews during the first 2 months with 2 to 3 interviews per week on average, I summarized the following insights from the test results:

• Mayv's target users are on average in the age of 35 or above, thus many of them are not tech-savvy.
• Many of the users found the texts too small to read.
• Not everyone is familiar with the icons such as "Home", "Profile", "Send Message", etc.

Solving Core Accessibility Issues

From the insights, I soon realized these are accessibility issues with the original UI. For Mayv's target audiences, which are elders, they need an app that is easy to read and browse, and has icons that have clear labelings of what they are.

Therefore, I suggested the following design strategies to improve the usability:

• Enlarging the text 
• Increasing color contrast
• Adding labels under the icons

Final Visuals

After 19+ rounds of iterations with the external agency, we finalized the UI for the app launch in November 2020.