Napses was an awesome experience and during my relationship with them I was driven to fully explore my curiosity in UX. When I first joined them it was the Summer after I had graduated college. We were all feeling a little disappointed by the technology that was being used as a CMS for classrooms during our last years at school and felt that there could be a better way of managing a college course.
We set out to create a CMS for professors that would connect them directly to students and that could be used for collaboration both in and out of the classroom.
Originally the scope we had envisioned for Napses was epic.
Through many living room discussions, feedback from advisors and the growing suspicion that maybe we were flying a bit too close to the sun we finally revised our vision to focus on one part of the higher education experience: Readers.
I was exciting to go from a amorphous behemoth to a lean, sleek, MVP. I was taking General Assembly’s UX course at the time and was reading books such as Mobile First and Lean UX so the pivot really excited me as I now had a focal point to turn my curiosity and interest.
I began doing research.
This was mostly done somewhat casually with card sorts to get the mental model of our potential users mapped out. It mostly involved going to college students and recent grads. Asking them if they wouldn’t mind taking 15 minutes to sort out a deck of cards into groups and then taking a picture of that and then drawing conclusions on how users would navigate our platform from those terms.
From the card sorts I began to play with making sitemaps.
I made several of these as we had a multi-sided platform. On one end students would be reading and interacting with the professor. On the professor’s the system had to be a little more complex in order to allow for the curation of content.
Along with the card sorts I also began to conduct qualitative interviews in order to create some personas:
The personas were mostly my little way of getting our meetings to revolve around “Chad” and “Peggy” instead of “I”. I hoped that it would be a subtle way to disarm our team of our many biases and assumptions when it comes to how we liked to interact with a platform. It worked to some degree. We no longer said “I like it when the button is here” Instead the team was using statements like “Well, Peggy probably wouldn’t want…” and “Chad could probably do…” We were still working off assumptions but it was a step in the right direction.
Finally it was time for wire framing and I put together every single view that the user might see on the mobile end first. There was some contention here because not everyone was sold on the mobile first. I found that the conversation between which to focus on was consuming too much of our time so I offered to take care of the design of the mobile side with some help from a colleague while another segment of the team worked on the web app.
So I finished up with the mobile views. What now?
Time to validate!
With the mobile views made I went on to create a clickable prototype using Invision. Along with a test script of simple tasks and a makeshift User testing station (pictured above) I went about testing and recording the user’s interaction with the prototype in order to justify my design choices.
During the two years with Napses was alive we as a team learned so many new things. I had been exposed to so many sides of how a business would need to operate. As a team of five there was plenty of opportunity to cross pollinate our skill sets. We had some awesome accomplishments too. We ran a small beta, briefly provided a service for a professor at UCSB and won 3rd place in the New Venture Competition for UCSB’s TMP New Venture Competition.
An Expanded Portfolio of my work at Napses is available here.