Austin Todd

Design Challenge

Our challenge was to identify a target market and area of need, and design an accessible third-party mobile app where people can easily discover and share their love of music with others in the same space, in-person, whether or not they have a music service subscription or digital library.

Prototype

Discovery

Who are our users?Adults who want a way to share music with their own touch of personality.

Ideation

User Interviews

First, we interviewed someone within our target demographic, a 45-year-old male who misses the physical media sharing of the not-so-distant past.

Framing The Solution

User Flow

Wireframes

Retrospective

The Mixify project for the Adobe Creative Jam taught me so much about working efficiently tight deadlines. The project timeline was one week so

The Ask

During my Internship at Mouser Electronics, I was tasked with assessing the entire checkout process for Mouser.com for accessibility and usability issues.

Identifying Issues

During my Internship at Mouser Electronics, I was tasked with assessing the entire checkout process of Mouser.com for accessibility and usability issues. Before I started I knew I would need a way to prioritize each issue to ensure my time would be spent solving the problems with the most impact.

Tools

I used three different tools to discover and prioritize potential issues.

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We came back from this session with a great problem statement:
For every 5 selections of the "Credit Card/Debit Card" button there is 1 misclick

Presentation

At the end of my internship, I had the opportunity to present my findings to the Internet Business Department at Mouser Electronics including senior leadership. This gave me a great first experience of contributing to stakeholders as an individual and left me confident in my ability to present abstract ideas to business stakeholders.

Retrospective

My 10 weeks at Mouser came and went quickly but the countless learning experiences have remained a pivotal experience in my early UX career. From the opportunities to brainstorm with the entire UX team to post-lunch design discussions. My internship was dense with important lessons in design and business.My internship at Mouser Electronics gave me the experience necessary to start my user experience career on the proper footing.

Process

During this experience, we were taught Dialexa's UX process by our mentors who walked us through each of the 3 sprints: research, perform, and report.

Sprint 1: Research

Product IdentificationOur first goal as a group was to ensure we come to alignment on the products identify. Our first exercise achieved this by having each team imagine our product as a person and describing what we think this person would be like. At the end of the exercise, we voted on each other's suggestions to ensure we had a unified vision of the design direction for our future product.

Empathy MappingIn order to better understand the humans, we are designing for we created Empathy Maps as a way to better empathize with our users. We used 2 of our personas and focused on specifics like what they are doing, saying, thinking, and feeling throughout their experience. This helped the team to have a shared understanding of the users as well as identifying what we didn't know.

Competitive AnalysisWe used what we knew about possible competitors to identify gaps in the services offered in order to design a better product for our specific problem.

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Sprint 2: Perform

How Might We?How Might We's (or HMW's) are a great exercise in identifying potential solutions. I found this to be a highly effective way to get the ball rolling during the ideation phase of a project.

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Crazy 8'sBased on our findings from the How Might We's and earlier research we began to ideate as a group, first focusing on a wide range of ideas before converging on a few we think will benefit our users the most.We all started by coming up with 8 ideas followed by a group discussion on each team member's ideas. We then voted on the most beneficial features represented by stars.

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User Flow

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Mid to High Fidelity WireframesThis was when the project really came together. The entire team worked from low-fidelity to working prototypes. Style guidelines were a vital tool at this point of the project because it enable all of us to work semi-independently while also maintaining a strong visual style that unified our designs into one cohesive brand.

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Name IdeationIn order to come up with a name for our app we had a workshop in office in order to align our ideas in to one short title for our app.

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This excersise helped the group to come up with the name for our project. We landed on the name Untold Dallas.

Sprint 3: Report

ReportI definitely learned the most from this section of the Dialexa EDU experience. We were given the opportunity to present our product to the other groups of students and mentors as well as Dialexa employees in the office.

Retrospective

The Dialexa EDU was a challenging and worthwhile experience through and through. This project required strict time management of myself. Being a full-time student, working part-time, and working collaboratively with the Untold Dallas design team pushed me to work hard. Looking back on the experience I am confident the hard work was well worth it. I left the experience with a new understanding of Engineering, storytelling, teamwork, and UX design as a whole. I left his experience with a renewed appetite to continue to build my skills around design in a corporate setting.