Elliott Gardner

What is Expertly

Expertly Is a project created while studying UX at the CareerFoundy. The app's goal was to improve people's access to knowledgeable people in a wide range of fields.

The app allows users to chat with experts for a small fee and rate them based on how helpful they were, this rating system then helps other users pick who to choose to ask their questions to. The aim is to in the future enable more functionality including searching questions that have already been asked so users have access faster to usefull infomation.

My Role

This was a solo project and I was a UX Designer and Researcher for this project

Design Thinking

The project followed the design thinking process, this helped to give structure to the project and give all the needed information to build upon in the later stages removing the need for guesswork. UX is an iterative process and so it is necessary to go back and revisit steps to further refine the design.

Problem statement

Competitor Analysis

User Interveiws

User personas
User Journey Maps
User Flows

User stories
infomation Architecture

Low-fi Paper Wire frames

Lo-fi digital wireframes

lo-fi clickable prototype

Mid-Fi Prototype.

Usabilty testing

Refining the desgin

design system

Problem statment

This problem statement helped me to understand what the aim of the project is from a user's perspective and helped to guide the rest of the process.

"A car owner needs away to get advice on a problem there car is having because they do not trust a quote they have had from the local garage

We will know this to be true when we see a car owner can get an expert's advice that they can trust in under 24 hours."

Competitive Analysis

For inspiration and to see what others are doing well and where I can make big improvements I carried out a competitive analysis on the closest apps I could find JustAnswers and Quara. While Quara is less related in terms of business model it still aims to bring people answers to their questions.

I looked at the apps from several angles including how they place themselves in the market, their marketing strategy and their UX.

Below are some highlights from this work.

User Interveiws

To get an understanding of what users are looking for in the app I interviewed 3 possible users with an age range of 29 to 60 from a mixture of backgrounds, asking them several questions covering a range of questions from how often they use a mobile device to how they currently look for information.

once the interviews complete I organised the data into an infinity map.

Insights

Once the data was orginsed into the infinity map I descovered the following insights:

Users willing to pay for speed and quality
Users are willing to pay to get answers to their questions providing they were confident they were getting value for money, for them this was that the answers were reliable and had a quick turnaround.

Customers spend a lot of time trying to find reliable information for free
Users currently spend a lot of time hunting down reliable information, this could be waiting a long time for someone to get back to them on a platform like Facebook or sifting through 1000s of web pages. Users value their time and find this very frustrating.

Multimedia is important

Users wanted more than just text, they are looking for images and videos and even live video chatting to help solve their problems faster. Images and videos can help simplify complex solutions for people as some things can be challenging to put into words.

Users are open to their questions being shared

Users are open to the idea of their questions being made viewable by others if made anonymous, they also liked the idea of being able to search asked questions as this means they could find someone who has already asked what they wanted speeding up the process to finding an answer

Experts need to be of high quality

A fast turnaround isn't helpful if the experts don't know their stuff, users wanted industry experience over anything else to ensure they were paying for someone who knew their stuff. They also wanted to see reviews from others to further verify the quality of their replies.

User Personas

Using what I had learned from the research it was time to personify the findings in the form of user personas, I created two to cover some of the large range of possible users who could benefit from the app. each persona has there own needs and problems that the app will try its best to solve for.

User Journey Maps and Flows

To start to form a understanding of how the app will work for the user, user joneys maps laying out the steps they will take to complete there tasks.

moving from the map to the flow though the app, i started to think about what pages the user needs to compete these tasks

Information Architecture

It was important that I got the architecture of the web app correct. I first create a sitemap based on the user journey flows then use card sorting from optimal workshop to see if users group the same pages together that I did.

Using the data from this sort I made a few small changes to the site map to reflect what the users thought belonged togther.

This was the site map that came out of this research, however sone changes have been made further along in the design process

Prototyping and Testing

The app went through several stages of wireframes starting with basic paper wireframes. at the paper wireframe stage, a large number of ideas were tested out, including different styles of navigation.

Paper wireframes

Lo-fi digital wireframes

This was then recreated in Adobe XD, this was then used as the base for adding more detail and refining the design, it also means it can be viewed on a phone helping to give a better understanding of how usable it is in context.

Usability testing

After making the lo-fi digital wireframe into a clickable wireframe, I organised some usability testing to uncover any problems the app might have.

The testing uncovered 5 main issues that have been corrected, the biggest issue the app had was the review system was very complex and was hard for users to find, this was instead integrated into the messaging system.

Bringing it all together

After all this it was time to start bring it togther, applying Googles Material Design and Gestalt Principles to the app. This helped give the app a unifom look and feel while making the app more usable.

you can see the change from low to mid-fidelity as well as the process of using grids to improve the consistency

Using peer review

Using feedback from other students on the course I was able to make changes to improve the app, collaboration is so important both with users and other designers to get their perspective and to point out issues that may otherwise go missing.

The finished prototype can be see here

Final thoughts

This was an enjoyable project that I would love to see come to life and be further developed adding more functionality such as the ability to search already asked questions. The app would benefit from more user testing at this stage using the prototype in its current state.

Thanks to everyone at career foundry for help and feedback on this project.

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