top of page

Week 11: Delivering a Case Study

  • Writer: Alex Williamson
    Alex Williamson
  • May 5, 2022
  • 3 min read

Updated: May 18, 2022

This week I focussed on planning and writing my case study. I’d never written one before and this would be my first attempt at demonstrating my designs and decisions to others in this way. Morales (2020) suggests that UX case studies have the power to make you stand out against the crowd and are a crucial element when selling yourself to potential employers. Although I’m still trying to find my feet within the user experience sphere, I take on this point as a matter of consideration going forward.


To begin, I conducted a review of some UX case studies showcased on the Bestfolios (2022) website. This proved an inspiring task that revealed many design decisions taken by others, as well as how I might structure my case study. Based on my findings, I chose the following linear structure: introduction, research, design, iteration, and conclusion.


Structure Summary:

  1. Introduction: Explains the challenge brief and the user problem

  2. Research: Outlines the research methods used and the data collected

  3. Design: Explores the visual and experience design decisions and considerations

  4. Iteration: Reviews the various design stages and how usability testing helped shape these

  5. Conclusion: Discusses reflections on the overall process, obstacles, outcomes and considerations for future work


Articulating Design Decisions

Greever (2020) describes the ability to articulate your design decisions in a way that persuades, captivates and engages others as crucial to success. This was some useful advice when considering my own design decisions, encouraging me to explore why I’d made the choice I did and the impact these had on the overall user experience. Below are some examples of my articulations in the completed case study:

  • I found an excellent website, UnDraw, with a library of illustrations with licences allowing for use in this project. These were great for providing a visual aid throughout the user journey and for providing an appealing backdrop to some screens. On some occasions, I altered the designs to match the context of the screen they were being used on.

  • Primarily, I used Google’s Material Design icons throughout my designs due to their plentiful supply and range of variants. Their flat design is fitting with the rest of the app and provides effective visual signposts at various stages. Although the icon library is vast, I had to modify some variants to better fit my intended use for them in the app; this mainly concerned the ticket icon.

  • As with the colour palette, the typeface had to represent calmness, trust and ease to fulfil the experience aims. I started exploring font pairings on fontpair.com and found it so interesting to see how the many categories of typefaces work well together. The pairing I chose was Quicksand with Quicksand, where the range of weights is used as the differentiator. This font was designed for display purposes but can be used in small sizes too due to its readability (Google Fonts 2022). I feel it holds playful elements and is very fitting for the branding and intended user experience.


Key Lessons and Takeaways:

  • Chiefly, I need to spend longer planning my time at the beginning of a project. Throughout this module, I learnt so many things from scratch that I ultimately ran out of time to focus on the finer details of the task. For example, I'm pleased with the progress I made in learning to use Figma, but feel this detracted from my testing efforts and ability to constantly review my progress.

  • I feel that I also need to regain a focus on the user’s experience as opposed to the visual design. As the visual element was a new endeavour, I focussed on perfecting my knowledge at the expense of the users journey. In my eyes, this is essentially completing half the job, but I can see how it happened due to the time constraints and plethora of new information I was taking in.


Final Prototype



References

BESTFOLIOS. 2022. ‘Bestfolios - UI/UX Design Portfolio Inspiration and Showcase’. Bestfolios [online]. Available at: http://www.bestfolios.com/ [accessed 15 May 2022].


GOOGLE FONTS. 2022. ‘Google Fonts’. Google Fonts [online]. Available at: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Quicksand [accessed 11 May 2022].


GREEVER, Tom. 2020. Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience. Second Edition. Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo: O’Reilly.


MORALES, Justin. 2020. ‘UX Case Study Template and Examples | Adobe XD Ideas’. Ideas [online]. Available at: https://xd.adobe.com/ideas/perspectives/leadership-insights/ux-case-study-template/ [accessed 15 May 2022].


UNSPLASH. 2021. Camera on Tripod Taking a Woman’s Photograph. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/gmI5H2exWng [accessed 16 May 2022].

Comments

bottom of page