Viking Blogger Demo: Discovery Phase

The Viking Blogger App is a demo application that we’ll be building during the prep work and over the course of our intensive program to show you an end-to-end design and production process for a real web application.

The prep videos will focus on the planning, design, user experience and mocking up of the application while our intensive course will cover its construction using Ruby on Rails, Javascript, HTML and CSS and its deployment to Heroku. Go to http://vikingcodeschool.com to learn more.

Transcript

1. The Viking Blogger: Discovery Phase The Discovery phase of the Design Process — where we find our users and their needs 1
2. The Design Process Remember the Design Process steps? 1. Discovery — figure out who the user is, what their goals are, and what will make them happy when using the app! 2. Strategy — figure out what information architecture, navigation, and interactions will best bring the user to their goals… imagine good UX! 3. Design — mock up the pages to best serve the user goals. 2
3. Discovery Phase: Identifying Users Through conversations with our many potential users, we’ve identified our two key user personas — “Sven” and “Helga”. Sven: A 24 year-old viking warrior who is quite familiar with computers and likes to write about his travels and raids. He is often on-the-go and doesn’t have a lot of time to spare Helga:! A 44 year-old former shield maiden who manages a household back in Gotland but wants to keep track of the travels and raids of her children and other warriors from the village. She usually has quite a bit of free time to swap stories and check up on friends but not a lot of computer literacy. 3
4. Discovery Phase: Critical Goals What are the critical goals here? 1. The ability to post photos and text quickly (Sven) 2. The ability to consume posts and photos simply (Helga) 3. Build lots of users and sell for > $1 billion (The Business) What will make the users happy? 1. Simplicity — computer complexity makes Helga nervous 2. Flavors of home and exclusivity — they both want a product that’s very viking-focused 4
5. Discovery Phase: Secondary Goals Additional questions of our users revealed the following secondary goals: 1. Be able to modify and delete posts you’ve authored 2. Comment on posts 3. View posts only from certain categories at once 4. Search for old posts in the archive 5
6. Discovery Phase: Wrapping Up That was a quick look at the three major objectives of the discovery phase: 1. Figure out who the users are (Sven and Helga) 2. Figure out what their major goals are (read posts intuitively and create posts quickly) 3. Figure out what makes them happy (simplicity and a bit of Viking flavor) 6
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