PROJECT OVERVIEW
This was a project I worked on in the HCDE’s Graduate Student Association Design For Passion summer project. I partnered with 3 HCDE graduate students to conduct research and design a mobile app for Pure Watercraft’s electric outboard motor product.
Our client, Pure Watercraft, is a Seattle-based startup, specializing in providing clean and sustainable electric outboard motors.
TIMELINE
10 weeks (July -Sept 2020)
DELIVERABLES
Research findings, low-fidelity wireframes
ROLE
Lead researcher and design strategist (developed the research and design strategy)
TOOLS
Figma and Miro
THE PROBLEM
“How do we get our customer’s to download a companion app?”
Pure Watercraft needed a companion app for their outboard motor product, so that they could transfer data from their user’s outboard motor to their Cloud database. This would enable them to gather telemetry and push updates directly to their customer’s outboard motor.
To get their customer’s to download this app, they needed it to be useful and engaging.
Research
How might we design a companion app that helps leisure boaters to meet their boating goals?
To design an engaging mobile app experience, our research objective was centered on understanding the goals leisure boaters hope to accomplish while boating. Additionally, we sought to understand the needs they experienced that hindered them from meeting their boating goals.
We conducted 5 semi-structured user interviews (3 sailors and 2 speed boaters) to understand user goals and needs.
ANALYZE & SYNTHESIZE
User Goals
After analyzing our research findings in Miro, we discovered two common goals amongst the 5 users: Quality Time and Adventure.
I want to spend quality time with family and friends.
I want to experience a memorable adventure.
Quotes from the user interviews
User Needs
We created a user journey map and categorized user boating activities into 4 main steps: Plan, Prepare The Boat, Start Boating, Return And Secure.
After analyzing user needs and pain points, we discovered that trip planning and motor troubleshooting were the primary areas that hindered users from reaching their goals. Users lacked a way to plan their route and discover adventurous points of interests. Motor issues prevented them from spending quality time with their friends and family.
Trip Planning
Boaters do not have a comprehensive source to plan and save their trip.
The rely on one or more platforms to plan the segments of their trip.
This inconsistency causes frustration as they have to juggle between multiple sources while planning their trip.
Motor Troubleshooting
5/5 users experienced unpredictable motor failures that either put them in danger or wasted their time.
5/5 Users desired a way to monitor the health of their motor in order to prevent unexpected breakdowns.
Ideate
Ideating on design solutions
We refined our design questions to account for our newly discovered goals and needs, and began to ideate on design solutions.
After days of ideating, sketching, and prioritizing…..
DESIGN
Initial designs
We settled on 3 design features that would better help users to accomplish their goals:
Explore and Trips
Solution: A comprehensive trip planning tool.
User Goal: I want to experience an adventure.
Explore and Trips allows users to explore interesting points of interest, save favorite destinations and points of interests, and build their trip. Users no longer have to worry about juggling multiple platforms to plan their trip, the app takes care of that need. In addition, it enables users to discover recommended stops and detours in the water to ensure they are able to experience a memorable adventure.
Explore:
Explore enables users to browse and save favorite destinations and points of interests.
Trips:
Trips allows users to build their trip, view saved trips and points of interests.
In Trips users can select from recommended routes.
Motor Health
Solution: Outboard motor performance dashboard.
User Goal: Spend quality time with loved ones.
The Motor Health feature allows users to check the performance of their outboard motor system before taking their boat out on the water. This provides confidence and allows them to focus on spending quality time with their friends and family while boating. If a part does break down, the guided motor troubleshooting feature helps them to quickly troubleshoot the issue.
Motor health:
Dashboard that allows users to monitor the performance of their outboard motor system.
Provides a user-friendly guided motor troubleshooting experience.
Prototype
Trips
Explore
Motor Health
Learnings and next steps
This design project taught me the importance of using research to truly understand subconscious and conscious user goals in order to build an experience that satisfies latent needs. Focusing on user goals allowed us to build a mobile app that benefited both our client, Pure Watercraft, and their users.
Our client wanted us to provide them with research findings and low-fidelity wireframes, conducting usability tests was not in scope. If we were to continue working on this project, we would conduct several rounds of usability tests and iterate on our design to ensure it truly enables leisure boaters to meet their goals.