April 20th is, to understate it, a bit of a holiday for the cannabis community. For businesses that sell legal weed, the date also marks their biggest sales figures of the entire year. Those numbers are probably going to look a bit different this year, with COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders across the country likely putting cannabis delivery companies under extra high demand. As we all #stayhome to #smokeweed this 420, I thought I’d write about the unique design challenges I faced at a cannabis delivery startup last year.

The year was 2019. In California’s Bay Area, spring flowers were blooming and the Golden State Warriors were coming off a record setting season as they prepared to enter the playoffs.

For bud.com, a cannabis delivery startup based in Oakland and expanding into cities all across California, this spring also marked an identity overhaul that would redefine their brand assets, marketing approach, and user experience from the bottom up.

I joined bud.com’s design team as their second designer (under the Design Director) and their fifth employee overall. At such a small, young startup, everyone at the company was expected to wear multiple hats and solve for problems beyond their job description. My role as a Product Designer included the expected full-spectrum UX work — from research through prototyping and testing to shipment — but also included copywriting, SEO optimization, marketing, social media management, and more.

The Problem

The design team’s main objective was a top-to-bottom UX overhaul of the entire bud.com site. Bud’s initial site design was implemented without a design team by mimicking other successful delivery companies’ approaches and design aesthetics. Once they had enough business to keep afloat, mimicry wasn’t going to set them apart as leaders in the industry. For that, they’d need their own identity and a real product design team.

The Solution

The Design Director joined bud.com a few months before I did, and made it his first order of business to infuse human-centered design throughout the organization.

A step up from user-empathy, human-centered design offers complete commitment to solving problems from the perspective of the emotional, psychological, and physical ergonomics of the people using your products.

This unshakable commitment to their users became bud.com’s brand identity, and it became my job to help infuse that identity across all aspects of company’s products and services. My role included copywriting, usability, and marketing.

The Process

Being a designer at bud.com meant that we were always engaged with multiple projects at once. These different projects were, however, closely related, and our design process retained the same steps for all of them:

Research & Definition

The key elements of our research and definition phase consisted of:

• Contextual inquiry of our customers — how do people buy legal weed? Develop empathy, identify patterns, and document findings.
• Heuristic evaluation of the legacy website, including severity rankings.
• Competitive analysis — Compare competitors’ design elements, strategies, strengths and weaknesses.
• Define key research findings and design strategy via artifacts such as user flow diagrams, information architecture, and a design style guide.

Ideation & Prototyping

This phase involved translating the key insights of our research into tangible, interactive models that could be tested and rapidly improved:

• Wireframing & rapid prototyping
• UI & Interaction design
• Visual design
• Clickable, high-fidelity prototype design
• Product specifications (detailed specs for engineer handoff)

The Project(s)

Our many projects could be sorted into two main groups: branding and marketing, and e-commerce UX/UI:

Branding & Marketing

We took a geo-marketing approach to our branding and advertising, and geo-targeted our customers based on their location.

This allowed us to leverage the in-group favoritism people naturally develop for the concept of being a local, where pride in one’s hometown translates to a tendency to shop locally and support local economies. By targeting our advertising this way, we were able to display our own in-group “cred” and inspire loyalty by proxy.

The slogan “we deliver trees like the dubs splash threes,” for example, celebrated Warriors sports-team based pride, expressed via slang familiar with target in-groups, without directly naming the team or any of their players and risking legal repercussions.

We continued writing variant slogans for our other regions, researching those locations’ cultural specificities, and user-testing copy along the way.

The geo-targeting approach also related to how our delivery service functioned— customers enter their zip codes on our site and are matched with the regional dispensary partner that provided our service’s inventory. The design of these regional virtual stores took the same localized approach.

We personalized each regional site with a masthead. The design evolved over several iterations; we fine-tuned the H1 & H2 copy, tried different images, tested the results, and made improvements to assure that it would meet both our user and business requirements. Once we had validated the effectiveness of this design via Google Analytics, it served as the template for all our regional stores — San Francisco, Oakland, San Mateo, Marin, & Sacramento.

Copywriting gets even more complex when you factor in search engine optimization and legal restrictions about how businesses are allowed to advertise cannabis. And because legalized weed is so new, those rules have a tendency to change — so we stayed flexible. Some of our initial copy was reworked because it now sounded too prescriptive, so “Smoke. Eat. Vape.” became “Flower. Edibles. Vapes.” — which works even better.

So while SEO and legally restricted copy doesn’t always look and sound as fluid as creative writers may intend, our strategic middle ground fought to preserve the natural quality of our regional copywriting, optimize for search, and refrain from breaking any laws. In the end, we succeed in serving these three masters without loosing effectiveness points in any category.

E-Commerce UX & Visual Design

One of my main contributions to the UX/UI overhaul of the site was my work on the visual design, which I spearheaded. The Design Director had developed a new brand direction, style guide, and masthead aesthetic before bringing me on. I was then tasked with continuing his work, and developing a UI approach that would sync with the new assets, stand out from our competitors, and stay user-focused every step of the way.

An unusual aspect working at bud.com had to do with the incredibly rapid pace that we kept as a design team. Leadership wanted our work yesterday, and we sprinted at breakneck speed to deliver production-ready designs as quickly as possible.

One way this played out was that we worked nearly exclusively in high-fidelity. By keeping our files exceptionally well organized (which also helped our all-remote team collaborate efficiently), and working diligently with symbols, I was able to rapidly ideate, test, and iterate in high fidelity after getting basic structures and interaction patterns down with lower fidelity wireframes.

We also relied heavily on interactive prototyping and creating GIFs that illustrated interactions and behaviors. This helped us with rapid guerilla user-testing, and with explaining our designs to a leadership team who preferred concrete examples over connecting the dots.

Some revelations from our usability testing sessions lead to the following key UX & UI improvements:

• Add scrolling text on the top notification bar to accommodate multiple relevant messages without sacrificing screen space
• Nest SEO copy into scrolling product rows, to capitalize on the value of SEO content without losing screen space to long paragraphs of text
• Increase tap target size
• Ability to index the product weight or size up/down from the product cards, not just the product detail page to help with the quick-add action
• Cannabis-type (sativa, indica, CBD, etc.)indicated by both text and color

All of this was built into subsequent versions of the prototype, documented in the design spec, and ultimately launched.

Implementation on the live site today looks a little different than on the design spec, but it’s still a vast improvement to bud.com’s prior form. And though I may have moved on (to another cannabis startup), I sometimes still get the treat of meeting people who say it’s their favorite delivery service.

So happy 420. And if you imbibe, may you imbibe safely… maybe with something delivered by bud.com ;)

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!

Credits: User flow & desktop product mock by Design Director & super-mentor Shalom Ormsby. All other graphic content by yours truly.

Design tools used: Sketch & Abstract (I’m a Figma convert now ✌️😎), Flinto, Principle, InVision, Photoshop & Procreate.

Stay Home, Smoke Weed: UX & Cannabis Delivery are a Potent Hybrid was originally published in UsabilityGeek on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For anyone unfamiliar with General Assembly’s User Experience Design courses, a little background info: the full-time immersive bootcamp is designed to jumpstart students’ career changes into the field of UX. Group projects are a core component of the program, aiming to simulate real world design sprints students will face in future professional roles.

Project three, or P3, consists of a two week design sprint and a mock-project brief from a “client” inspired by a real local business. You can also read about my experience with final project here.

The Project

Client:

Patelco Credit Union

Duration & Type:

• 2 weeks
• 3-Person Team

Tools:

• Sketch, inVision
• Paper, pen, marker, paper prototyping, whiteboarding

The Problem

While Patelco has plenty of banking options to help their customers with the complexities of modern financial management, most are hard to find, or are simply missing, on their mobile banking app.

With large national competitors and fresh banking start-ups offering intuitive, feature rich money management tools, how can Patelco stay in the game, retaining their loyal (but frustrated) customers while also attracting new ones?

The Solution

By introducing new balance and budgeting features, as well as completely overhauling the information architecture, we were able to eliminate the stress users faced when navigating Patelco’s app in search of particular financial information and replace it with a sense of confidence and security.

My Role

User Research, Data Synthesis, & Rapid Prototyping:

Conducted user interviews, synthesized and distilled research data into actionable findings, created interactive paper and digital prototypes, conducted usability testing.

Visual Design & Storytelling:

Communicated research data by illustrating personas and narrative storyboards, synthesized our divergent ideation, contributed to hi-fi design and illustration, refined the design of the app in response to usability testing, accessibility standards, and UI best practices

The Process

As our timeframe for this project was a very compressed two-week sprint, we scheduled each phase of the design process meticulously. We time-boxed daily deliverables, and assigned tasks so as to keep ourselves on track and accountable to each other.

The Research Phase

User Interviews

From the beginning, we faced challenges where users were reluctant to share openly regarding their personal financial status. In order to overcome this roadblock, we worked with prospective participants individually until they felt comfortable.

We set up dummy accounts for our competitive task analyses, so that participants didn’t need to reveal their personal data, or let them describe tasks to us without showing us their screens. For interviews, we assured them that they could share only as personally as they were comfortable with and that everything they did share would be kept confidential.

Competitive Analysis

We continued our research by conducting a competitive analysis, comparing Patelco’s app to those of some of their most prominent competitors. We learned about available features by organizing task analysis sessions with testing participants across all of the applications, on both iOS and Android platforms.

Stacked up against some of the competition, Patelco’s app is clearly lacking certain features that are becoming standard in the industry:

• Users are not able to save for a goal, budget, or see their spendings broken down into categories.
• Infographics to visualize spending habits, and trends over time, are noticeably absent.
• The navigation and information architecture was confusing, and left users frustrated enough to abandon the assigned tasks.

“Does this tool even exist in the app? Why can’t I find it? This is too frustrating, I don’t have time for this.””

— Task Analysis Participant

Synthesize the Data

Once our depth and breadth of research gave us a firm enough understanding of who Patelco’s users were, and how the competition was attracting them, we synthesized our key findings via affinity mapping.

Organizing feedback from our user interviews this way, we were able to distill seemingly disparate statements into overarching categories of emotional motivations and frustrations.

Personas

Using those synthesized data points, we created our personas, whose particular joys, needs, and pain points would guide the design of our product.

“Amari” became our special persona, as she represented a demographic of current loyal customers who who’s frustrations with the current interface would be alleviated by rolling out new features. “Chris” became our secondary persona, as he represented a demographic of potential future customers who would like to bank with Patelco, but also prioritized feature rich, design-forward, convenient app experiences over financial institution affiliation.

“Robin” became our primary persona, as her struggles and aspirations when it came to managing finances best represented the majority of our research findings. Additionally, Robin’s demographic was most at risk for abandoning Patelco in favor of competitors with more money-management features.

Journey Maps

To dig even deeper into understanding the Robin’s goals and frustrations, we created a user journey map and graphed out her archetypal experience when trying to create a budget in the app. This step helped identify critical areas of improvement.

Other Tools

We also crafted storyboards that illustrated Robin’s desired experience. Then, we used comparative user flows to plot out the specific points in the process that needed to be redesigned or implemented to achieve that desired experience.

The Design Phase

Moving into the design phase, we hosted our own “design studio” to rapidly sketch divergent solutions.

In addition to creating a budgeting tool, we wanted to address Robin’s anxiety with making spending decisions on-the-go. Once a budget was in place, could it automatically adjust your available balance in anticipation of upcoming expenses and savings categories? We created a “Free-2-Spend” feature, which would do just that.

User Testing

Refining the best of those ideas, we crafted paper prototypes and dove into usability testing. Feedback from those testing sessions validated some hypotheses and sent us back to the drawing board on others.

We brought refined concepts into the digital realm, re-testing with wireframes and mid-fidelity interactive prototypes.

We tested our mid-fidelity prototypes with 5 participants, with ages ranging from 26–47. They were tasked with setting a budget, and with accessing, interacting with, and interpreting their mock-financial data.

After some final rounds of testing and a few finishing touches, and because time waits for no human, we arrived at the proverbial finish line and presented our work to our peers in the program.

Next Steps

Though our sprint timed out and each team-member moved on to other fun projects, there were next steps we would have loved to explore.

Particularly, some UI elements weren’t yet pixel perfect. Color relationships could be strengthened. Infographics in the budgeting section needed finessing.

But letting go of projects that aren’t destined for development is also part of being a good UX designer. If anyone reading this is thinking about a switch to UX and has questions about my personal journey to find it, feel free to get in touch at miahariel.xyz :)

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!

Credits: Humaaans by Pablo Stanley, remixed by me. Project collaborators Anna Hoang and Vera Park. All other content by yours truly.

Note: we’re not affiliated with Patelco in any way, and this was a conceptual project completed for the purpose of learning and play.

UX Case Study: Mobile banking elevates a local credit union’s competitive edge was originally published in UsabilityGeek on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By nature, every cannabis adjacent business is young — medical and recreational legalization have only been around for so long — and even state cannabis compliance agencies are new at what they do.

If you’re a successful young startup operating in this space, you’re navigating multiple challenges: keeping abreast of the needs of a rapidly growing business, and keeping on top of the complications of compliance.

The Problem

Greenbits — a cannabis-industry startup — evolved from humble origins into a full-scale retail solution with point-of-sale, inventory-management, and third party integrations. The number of Greenbits employees nearly doubled in 2018 alone.

While such rapid growth was welcome, Greenbits also found itself caught in a pickle — their new employees had not been equipped with a straightforward way to learn about their product and platform offerings, many of which were still being defined. Their onboarding program was a good start, but fell short of explaining why the product behaves as it does — or what real-world scenarios it’s intended to work in support of.

This problem was most impactful on the Product teams, where Product Managers, Designers, and Engineers often found themselves imagining solutions that were not in-line with the overall product vision and lacked understanding of the product’s historical context. Without this shared understanding and framework for evaluation, they would continue to produce a fragmented experience that didn’t meet the needs of their customers.

The Solution

When I joined Greenbits in 2019, we envisioned a “Product Development Guide” that would serve as an internal tool for educating our employees about the world of cannabis retail, cannabis compliance, and Greenbits’ products. The Guide would also serve as a central hub for referencing Brand and Product guidelines, customer research, vision, and goals.

In short, it would be the blueprint for how our platforms and products are supposed to work.

Cool… but how is this UX?

This project was an important reminder that UX is everywhere, and considering the “user experiences” of your own employees can have a powerful impact on workplace culture, talent retention, productivity, efficiency, and product quality.

Why me?

Greenbits’ lead designer assigned me to this project for multiple reasons:

• My pre-UX background in education and curriculum design made me uniquely equipped within the company to distill the opaquely complex into the easily, and enjoyably, digestible. It was my specialty as an educator, and it’s still my favorite part of being a product designer.
• As a newly hired designer at Greenbits, I had the benefit of documenting the process of my own learning. What did I need to know, when I started? What questions did I have about our product development process? About the world of cannabis compliance and retail? Each of those questions, and more, became sections of the Guide.

Who was the Product Development Guide for?

Cross-functional teams drive product development at Greenbits, and are composed of product designers, engineers, product managers/owners, customer support specialists, and quality assurance analysts. All of them were considered as intended users for the Guide.

The Product Development Guide

Core Concepts

This section looked at the entire ecosystem of Greenbits’ products, and how they interact with each other. It also defined who we are designing products for, & what those products need to do for our customers.

The first concept this section sought to explain was the difference between retail and compliance — two equally important aspects of our product.

Retail vs Compliance

When selling or shopping for cannabis, employees and customers bring expectations from regular retail to the cannabis retail experience. Helping our employees understand retail considerations as separate from compliance helped them design front of house solutions that could function as seamlessly as, say, an Apple store.

What is Compliance?

Because each state regulates cannabis differently, each state may also have different rules about who is allowed to buy it, in what quantities, and under what circumstances. Deeply understanding these details helped our employees buy-in to the purpose behind certain tools in our product, or customer requests for ones that did not exist yet.

“Customer Purchase Limits,” for example, is a feature that would protect cannabis retailers from looping customers who seek to abuse retail limits by leaving and returning to make multiple bulk purchases. Some store owners who have allowed this faced prison sentences, so it mattered that we got this feature right for our users.

In addition to keeping track of customer eligibility and purchase limits, businesses working in cannabis must keep track of the plants they cultivate, process, and/or sell. Traceability systems track cannabis materials through their life cycle, recording the chain of custody. Cannabis businesses are accountable to state compliance agents, and must be able to produce products or records thereof upon request.

Greenbits marketed itself as a safeguard against compliance violations like these, and our customers trusted our product to help them keep their compliance information organized and accessible. Understanding all aspects compliance requirements as a Greenbits employee was an important part of providing that service to our users.

Who are Greenbits’ users?

This section sought to explain the User Personas Greenbits designers had developed by researching their customers. In writing these sections, I also updated personas that had become outdated.

Greenbits had a lot of personas, but it needed to. As a complete solution for cannabis retailers, different parts of our product were optimized for different users. Depending on the feature or workflow, different personas would become primary and secondary users.

Organizational Archetypes

Organizational Archetypes described the conditions in which our products were used— the setting in which a user persona operates can influence their expectations and experiences.

Product Development Lifecycle

Without a defined product development lifecycle, all sorts of not-so-desirable outcomes might occur — solutions for one thing might break something else, or teams may work on solutions in a non-prioritized manner leaving our customers with urgent needs in the lurch. Even worse, teams may devote valuable time and resources developing a solution only to find that it wasn’t what our customers needed at all.

The lifecycle wasn’t so prescriptive that teams weren’t free to address bug fixes or small enhancements on their own, but it did provide avenues for bigger jobs to be folded into the more defined development process.

How the Guide is Used to Build Products

The remainder of the Guide aimed to synthesize concrete research from real-world observations, which we used to build product design requirements, grade our current solutions, and guide development of future solutions. If a team were to tackle upgrades to, say, the incoming inventory workflow, they would refer to the Receiving Inventory section of the guide.

In each product workflow section, we first outlined who we were designing this experience for and formally described their actions and expectations based on stakeholder interviews, site visits, and other research.

As different dispensaries can organize their businesses differently, there may be a variety of activities that are entailed in a singular task — i.e., not every user’s needs are identical. Story Maps are a great tool for quickly visualizing those various activities.

The activities documented in the Story Maps were organized and ranked in Key Path and Alternate Scenario Tables. By detailing the scenarios we were designing for in a narrative form, we could understand what actions and data to prioritize when creating a solution.

We organized these priorities into two tables — Key Path Scenarios, for the highest priorities, and Alternate Scenarios, for the secondary priorities.

Artifacts such as screen shots and screen recordings were included in the Current Product Experience column, and a health score was assigned to our current solution in the Health Score column.

In addition to story maps and scenario tables, we included the following in each product workflow section:

• User Personas — the primary, secondary, and special-case Personas that these workflows should be optimized for.
• A problem statement — the overarching reason that we are creating a solution for this workflow.
• A vision statement — the vision that we have for our solution to the above problem statement.
• Competition experience — collected research on our competitor’s approach to these workflows was placed here.
• Product development history — the thinking and work that’s been done on these workflows thus far, to ensure new people understand the history of a workflow and how it’s evolved over time.
• Past design proposals —designs that were not developed due to time constraints, budget constraints, or shifting priorities. Cataloguing them here to ensured future designers could reference them for inspiration or direct implementation in the future. It also protected us from doing re-work by investing time developing ideas that had already been proposed.

While taking the time to clearly articulate these complex ideas may have seemed like an unnecessary investment to some, it allowed us to spread customer empathy throughout the organization and was key in driving design-focused roadmap changes at the highest level.

It improved the quality of our product design moving forward, and reduced time spent re-articulating concepts and decisions that had already been discussed. Product team members frustrated by re-work and product roadmap confusion felt more engaged and empowered with more agency over their work. Overall, the Guide experiment was a success, and continues to be used by Greenbits product teams today.

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!

Credits: Humaaans by Pablo Stanley, remixed by me. Persona cards by Portland-based design team member Alexis Peterka, with updates by me. Greenbits design lead Seth Banks & senior design team member Karin Curkowicz provided invaluable collaboration & mentoring on the project.

All other graphic content by yours truly.

A Cannabis Startup Designs User Experiences for its Own Employees was originally published in UsabilityGeek on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“I’ve been a prosthetist for over 30 years, and you’ve just shown me the value of rethinking my workflow… these are forms I want to fill out.”

— Michael Nunnery, Hand:Made Prosthetist

For anyone unfamiliar with General Assembly’s User Experience Design courses, a little background info: the full-time immersive bootcamp is designed to jumpstart students’ career changes into the field of UX. Group projects are a core component of the program, aiming to simulate real world design sprints that students might be faced with in future professional roles. During the capstone client project, student groups are paired with real clients who have applied to participate in the program.

In late 2019, my cohort began their client projects. Our group was assigned to Hand:Made, an Autodesk BUILD resident startup crafting durable upper-limb prosthetics for adaptive athletes who’ve experienced limb loss.

The Project

Duration & Type:

• 3 weeks
• 4-Person Team

Tools:

• Sketch, inVision, Illustrator, Google Forms
• Paper, pen, marker, whiteboarding

The Problem

Every amputee is unique — their residual limb is unique, and so is the life they lived pre-injury.

This makes designing the fit of a prosthetic device very complicated, but also important: discomfort due to poor fit accounts for most cases of prosthetic rejection.

Hand:Made’s new measurement system for socket design helped to solve this issue, but they were only able to fit new clients who could travel to their facilities. What if they could have reliable, highly accurate measurements recorded remotely?

The Solution

Our research revealed that it’s pretty hard to find two prosthetists that take measurements in the same way, and that neither prosthetists nor amputees could imagine a “miracle solution” to a long, laborious process. Even the prosthetists and designers at Hand:Made couldn’t picture the solution they were hoping we’d create.

So our team envisioned a communication hub that would train prosthetists in Hand:Made’s proprietary measurement system, transmit reliable data, and include the patients in the process of designing their own gear.

My Role

Project Management:

• Laid the foundation for a collaborative working environment to help each individual’s strengths shine
• Mediated conflicts, redistributed tasks as needed, and maintained morale
• Wrote daily agendas for EOD deliverables
• Managed or delegated all communication with client, interviewees, and usability testing participants

User Research and Data Synthesis:

• Conducted interviews and usability testing
• Synthesized and distilled research data into actionable findings

Visual Design:

• Synthesized our divergent ideation on dashboard concepts and contributed to process infographic design and illustration
• Designed the most complex screens — the orthotic form workflow

The Process

The nature of this project’s complexity made it clear that we needed to focus on diving deep into research before any design ideation at all, as our product would be a first-of-it’s-kind service for a very particular, niche group of users.

But we also wanted to leave enough design time to craft top-notch deliverables, so we organized our process into three distinct phases each with three of their own key stages:

The “research” phase was comprised of gathering and synthesizing data, and then strategizing based on our findings.

Once we moved into the “create” phase, testing was paramount. Making adjustments in response to that testing, and then testing again, guided our progress throughout the remaining sprint time — a cyclical process of ideating, testing, and refining on our work repetitively until we hit deadline.

The third, oft-overlooked phase was presenting our work. It was important to us that we put just as much care into communicating the reasoning behind our design decisions — to encourage stakeholder buy-in — as was put into the design work itself. We defined the stages of this phase as “tell,” “show,” and “imagine.”

1. Research

Gather

This project’s topic was so detailed, and so complex, that the “gather” phase of our research had its own sub-sections: Subject Matter Research, Comparative Analysis, Survey Questionnaires, User Interviews, and Field Research.

Additionally, it turns out that professional prosthetists are pretty hard to get a hold of. While we waited for responses to our interview requests, we dove into those other forms of research:

Subject Matter Research

We strove to understand the processes and challenges of prosthetic fitting, and what 3-D printing and scanning was bringing to the industry, on a deep level by doing subject matter research.

Comparative Analysis

Though the service we were designing didn’t exist yet, there were definitely other companies dealing in the communication and organization of biometric data.

We compared the workflows of three companies (Invisalign, Warby Parker, and LimbForge) against the workflow of Hand:Made, and illustrated our findings in a comparative features chart.

Survey Questionnaires

At the same time, we looked for more users to interview by turning to Instagram. We searched and posted via hashtags such as #adaptiveathlete hoping to find athletic amputees willing to participate in a survey questionnaire.

Participants responses were a great start in understanding the relationship amputees have with their devices, and with the experiences they have while being fit for one:

What would you change about the process of finding and fitting the right prosthetic device?

“I don’t know how to change a lengthy & tedious process. The casting, test socket, trial, refit, wear it. It’s as good as it gets but I always have problems. I’m not sure how to create a miracle.”

“I had a really good experience being fit with [prosthetics company].”

“I’m not sure how it could be different.”

User Interviews

A week and a half later, we had accumulated some excellent data. But we still hadn’t been able to talk to any actual prosthetists.

Finally, interview requests started getting responses… with enthusiasm. We were able to set up a number of interviews with some people doing incredible work in the field, and they were excited to hear about our work as well.

Here are some takeaways from two of our key interviews:

Key Takeaways:

• Designing sockets remotely is very difficult; all fitting is left to local clinics and LimbForge only provides technology and training
• Sometimes “lost function” is social and emotional — feeling “whole,” being perceived as “normal,” having confidence for self-expression, etc.

Key Takeaways:

• Prosthetists have an empathic connection with patients — one particularly felt during measuring and fitting; it’s a step they’re reluctant to relinquish to technology
• Unless — if new technology could make this step quicker and more painless for the patient, it would be welcome. Like UX designers, prosthetists are all about their user’s experience.

Field Research

We also attended a presentation of student work on Upper Limb Prosthesis Design at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at the College of Engineering, UC Berkeley, where we observed and inquired with the students, participants, and attendees.

By networking at the event we were able to meet Joshua Unterman, an orthotics and prosthetics development technician at UCSF.

Speaking with him gave us valuable information on how orthometry forms are used in the industry, and about their limitations.

We used this information to compare orthometry forms from other prosthetics manufacturers against the forms Hand:Made is currently using internally.

Synthesize

Once our depth and breadth of research gave us a firm enough understanding of our subject matter we synthesized our key findings into the creation of our personas, whose particular joys, needs, and pain points would guide the design of our product.

While “Ben” (the adaptive athlete) and his experience as end-customer was important to us, we labeled him as our special case persona. We decided on “Greg” (representing a Hand:Made manufacturer) as our secondary persona.

“Gina Reyes, CPO” became our primary persona, as guiding the prosthetist’s measurement taking process was the keystone of our project brief.

The prosthetists Hand:Made will be working with remotely need to learn Hand:Made’s proprietary measurement system, and errors in their workflow could throw off the socket fit entirely.

To identify which parts of Gina’s current workflow could be improved, we made a User Journey Map.

Our research made it clear that prosthetists have a strong bond with their patients that is particularly expressed in the process of measuring them for socket design and fit. Our product would take over some aspects of that process, so we wanted to make sure our design preserved Gina’s “joy points” while improving upon her “pain points.”

Strategize

With all our synthesized research data in hand, it was time for us to sift through and pull out the key points that would guide our design.

We used methods such as MOSCOW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Will have) and Feature Prioritization Charts to craft our Solution Statement and define our Minimum Viable Product.

2.Create

Ideate & Test

Before we began ideating on the interface of our product, we wanted to test Hand:Made’s orthotic workflow itself.

Were the right questions being asked? Were they being asked clearly? Were there any questions missing? Could prosthetists unfamiliar with Hand:Made’s measurement system follow the instructions without confusion? Was there anything else we had overlooked?

To get these questions answered, we built out Hand:Made’s workflow in a Google Form, and tested it with prosthetists that had participated in user interviews.

Feedback from these usability testing sessions informed our prototype revisions, particularly in rewording verbiage to prompt more accurately for precise measurement data.

Refine (& repeat)

At this point, we finally had enough data to begin work on the user interface design. From whiteboarding our initial concepts, to paper sketching and rapid prototyping, to wireframing in Sketch, we brought the product to life one step at a time.

With each iteration we continued to conduct usability tests with prosthetists, and we brought in designers and developers for their feedback as well.

3.Present

Tell

Once our deadline arrived, it wasn’t just a matter of handing something pretty over to our client. We wanted to ensure that they understood our process — how our design decisions were rooted in research and validated by testing — so we crafted a presentation rich with infographics and specific data points to aid us in telling the story of our product.

Show

After the “tell,” it was time to show. We walked our (very ecstatic) client through prototypes of the patient database, communication portal, and virtual orthotic form.

Check out an excerpt of the prototype here.

Imagine

What we were able to create in three weeks exceeded the expectations of our client, but it left out an important part of our vision. While the 3D-mark-up portion of our product’s virtual orthotic form had patient feedback ability built-in, we envisioned something larger.

What if there were a portal login for patients themselves, so that they could participate actively — as a collaborator — in designing their gear? Our team would have loved to explore those ideas further with additional time.

Instead, each of us went on to start our professional UX careers at companies across the Bay Area. If anyone reading this is thinking about a switch to UX and has questions about my personal journey to find it, feel free to get in touch at miahariel.xyz :)

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider to take an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research — Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!

Credits: Course instructors were the brilliant Imani Beauford and Shalom Ormsby. Comparative Features Analysis by team-member Kris de la Cruz. Comparative Workflow Diagrams by team-member Austin McIntosh. Macbook Mockup by Rubens Franco. Humaaans by Pablo Stanley, remixed by me. All other graphic content by yours truly.

On the day this project was completed, my father passed away unexpectedly. I’d like to take this space to acknowledge the visionary odd-ball, craftsman, and inventor who taught me that the limit of what’s possible is defined by the limit of your imagination. I love you dad — you live in everything I create.

UX Case Study: Modernizing prosthetic fitting for adaptive athletes was originally published in UsabilityGeek on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.