Application Design I - Task 2: Research
22/09/2025 - 19/11/2025 / Week 5 - Week 9
Aquela Zefanya Soares / 0374377
Application Design I / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media / Taylor's University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LECTURES
Week 5
Online Survey vs Live Interview
- online survey is for hard questions
- live interviews: user problems
- online survey: supplementary data
- online survey = reasoning / proof that ppl use the design
- online survey is for backup
Asking Questions
- make sure to ask questions that r useful to u
- u don't rlly need to ask demographic questions
- dont ask ppl features
- dont ask something that u alrdy know
- find what users need and find out urself
- dont guide them to answer the one that u want
- find problems that users r facing
- find out what they feel
- questions should be open stories
- ex: “how do u motivate urself to go to the gym?”
- create questions that lead to long text/explanation
- if possible, keep asking the reason/why (but dont make them uncomfy)
- don't create yes/no questions
- no questions abt features
- dont lead the answers, maybe their opinion is more than that
- eliminate questions that don't fit into live interviews or online surveys
Thinking Before Asking
- what kind of data do I want?
- what kind of result do I want?
Working With Data
- what to do w/ data:
- even it out: scatter the sources
- spread it
- find patterns
- find outliers (data points that don't match any others)
- why synthesizing:
- funnel it down
- make sense of it → highlight the important parts
- find the root cause → similar ideas highlight insights
- when to synthesize:
- volume too high
- hard to grasp
- too long to navigate
Week 6
Affinity Mapping
- affinity mapping: finding patterns, associating data
- what is an affinity map:
- research method to reveal themes
- thinking tool
- team discussion support
- splitting notes: 1 idea per note
- controlled chaos: 1 color per user → easier to divide themes
- split / merge grouping accordingly
- putting names on things: name ur groupings
- use easy grouping themes
- from users pov/feeling
- ensure it's relatable
Practical Workflow
- use columns; each user has their own column
- use diff colors to determine the relationship
- determine groups/themes like preparation, tracking etc
- use figjam or wtv
- decide what users lean more towards
- make sure it's relatable to the users
- designer can also have post-its (add ur own ideas)
- from similarities, create the persona
User Personas
- Basics
- personas help u find the solution through the app
- learning goals:
- identify best use of personas
- apply to craft personas
- create user scenarios
- what is a user persona?
- a super user created from the best bits of user interviews
- Purpose
- personas: tools to create empathy (imagination + interpretation)
- why use personas:
- summarize the research (no need to recheck everything)
- stretch the team's horizon
- align the vision
- focus efforts
Keeping Personas Alive
- print them out
- mention them in place of “users”
- refine and evolve them
- keep it a group work
Pros & Cons
- pros:
- brings user to the meeting
- puts us in their shoes
- creates a common framework
- evolves w/ each project
- cons:
- extra research time
- “designer’s puppet”
- us vs them mindset
- limited use
Creating Personas
- multitudes in one: combine selected users into a new super user
- no single (intention 1 sentence), only keep important data
- what makes a persona:
- name n face
- goals
- needs
- pain points
- social anchors
- relevant anchors
- know the target/priority: mastery, frequency
- other considerations:
- make them “normal”
- make them local
- give them problems
How Many Personas
- main persona → most common goals/needs (represents the 80%)
- secondary → specific goals/needs for audiences (less involved users)
- secondary/tertiary → another user of ur platform performing other function
- total: 3 personas
Week 7
User Persona Notes
Overall Flow
- summarize the problems, find more issues according to the data → basically create user persona from the problem
- purpose of having persona:
- to have a clear problem statement to address real user issues
- guide design decisions
- group it → find the issue → make it into 1 fictional person / personas
- persona → representing the whole group (a range of users)
- give ur persona a name
- compose personas based on actual data collected from multiple individuals
- personas add the human touch in your research
How User Personas Influence Product Decisions
- increased adoption
- crafting personas from multiple research provides a comprehensive view of user preferences and pain points
- enables the design of products that align with user preferences and solve their problems
- increased user retention
- understanding and documenting user pain points helps keep users engaged
- better prioritization
- each persona has pain points that u can create a prioritization from
Qualities of an Effective User Persona
- use real data
- focus on the present
- context specific
- avoid biases
Targets (Questions to Ask)
- who is my ideal customer?
- what are the prevailing behavioral trends exhibited by my users?
- what are the requirements and goals of my users?
- what challenges and pain points do they encounter when providing context?
Problem Statement Structure
- persona
- defines who the story is about
- this main character has attitudes, motivations, goals, pain points, etc
- scenario
- defines when, where, and how the story of the persona takes place
- scenario: narrative describing how the persona behaves as a sequence of events
- goals
- defines what the persona wants or needs to fulfill
- the goal: the motivation of why the persona is taking action
- demography
- what the persona has (characteristics, attitudes & values)
- who she is and what she wants (motivations & goals, needs & pain points)
- quotes
Persona Creation Tips
- multitudes in one: create options and then narrow it again
- don't need charts, keep stuff that u can read and understand in seconds
- output timing:
- 3 seconds → big photo, frame
- 30 seconds → who she is, her personality, goals n frustrations
- 3 minutes → the long text
- make ur own persona template
- don’t use templates from figjam, canva, etc
Journey Map
- journey map can be a day in a life
- why do journey maps? → want to understand the up and low points
- types of journey map:
- retrospect (how do we do it now)
- prospective (how do we do it in the future, has to be improvement)
- pros: visualize user pain points easily, bring personas into action, flexible, great for sharing
- cons: subjective, limited use
Week 8
Affinity Mapping
- what is affinity mapping?
- research method designed to reveal themes and insights from large sets of qualitative data
- a thinking tool to find new connections and links between different ideas
- a discussion support to help a team share and articulate common topics
Journey Map
- to make journey map:
- manipulate the time to know which one is more important or not
- elaborate the important part
- give a lot of opportunities
- make it longer, don't limit urself
User Flow
- user flow:
- make a flowchart
- based on user journey map
- process: start, step, decision, end 1, end 2 (not necessarily have to be there)
- rules:
- one way only
- stay at the same level of info/depth
- titles on everything
- legend/extra signs if needed
- steps, not screens (important)
- clarity before aesthetics
- define the use case before starting
- yes/no decisions only if possible
- explain what u add on the standards
- purpose: to design efficient task completion
Why Use User Flow Diagrams?
- design precision → map exact sequence of screens/pages (ensures clear & logical flow)
- proactive issue detection → identify potential pain points
- unified team vision
- facilitate user testing
- refine user experience
Site Map
- what is site map?
- a footprint showing how each page relates to the web/app’s hierarchy
- guides the user’s attention and organizes content meaningfully
- visual representation of site/app content organization
- hierarchy of nodes (boxes) representing pages or content
- arrows/lines indicate relationships between pages/interfaces
- with card sorting insights, u can create a logical & intuitive content organization in the site map
User Journey vs User Flow
- journey → experiences, captures emotional states
- flow → detailed explanation of the experience, captures logical thinking
How to Create User Flow for UX Design
- research on customers
- list the purpose and goal
- list the possible steps
- create the user flow
- review and update
Week 9
Wireframes
- when creating wireframes: start from home, skip the login
- references: mobbin (for specific app), product hunt (mostly AI), behance, dribbble
- ideas that are good → put into sitemap
- ideas that are not used → put them into a separate place
INSTRUCTION
><iframe src="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gtSS1J2lpWLbJweA-_xDrukA2R3HCXo9/preview" width="640" height="480" allow="autoplay"></iframe>
TASK
This assignment is a continuation of the previous one. We need to conduct user research based on the proposal we created earlier. First, we perform card sorting using the app competitors and left field references we selected. Then, to understand users better, we conduct live interviews and an online survey. After gathering the users’ points of view, we create personas and then develop the journey map and user flow. Once that is done, we proceed to the second card sorting, where we further filter which features users actually need. Finally, we create the sitemap and compile all the progress and summaries into slides.
Interview transcripts and audio
Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sC7TvO_P9RkwWTYPlFdRTumz-UhX75ui?usp=drive_link
Figjam
Slides
Canva link
REFLECTION
From this assignment, I realized how challenging it actually is to do research for an app. I thought affinity mapping and card sorting would be easy, but it took a long time to sort out all the pain points and opportunities. The same goes for creating personas and making the journey map, it was tricky for me to group my interview and survey results into clear user problems. But overall, the whole process was enjoyable for me.
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