UX/UI redesign case study — RTE Player
Teamwork and ethics
Project background
● Project outcomes — This project aims to develop our research and to design skills including:
○ UX research skills
○ Analysis and evaluation of findings
○ Finding insights into a digital design
○ Testing and iterations
● Topic — Redesign RTE player mobile app
● Team — Saturn / Member: Áine O’Neill, Michael Bengwagan, Michaela McParland, Tom Gillan and Jaesin Yu
● Final prototype — Figma link
The teamwork and collaboration
Our team laid out a project plan with select proper methodologies to solve our user experience problem on RTE Player. We had regular online workshop for discussion and collaboration work. Each member worked independently; we evaluated individual works and volunteered to reduce the prospect of overlapping workload. We continuously communicate through Microsoft teams and have weekly workshop once or twice a week to minimise miscommunication and drive the project in the right direction — keeping minutes in each meeting for the project’s progress. We have used an online collaboration board — Mural, Miro and One Drive for research and Figma for wireframe to prototype. There were time constraints as we all must find the right time for a meeting; it was all manageable.
We delegated work — used Dot voting often — according to the timeline and followed our pathways. Individual team members all contributed the equal amount of workload in different areas and roles. Each gave a push at some stage — some focused-on research, some design developments, and some in-usability testing plans. In the design process, we all took each part of the task flow to develop the wireframe and prototype.
Ethics
We considered Ethics in both research and product design perspective. Ethics are not legally binding — one is moral principles that are important to protect: Participants, Company and Data collected. During the research, ethics were shown throughout our research methods: user interview and survey to usability testing: recruitments, testing script and consent informing. Concerning list below -
● Dignity and comfort
● A purpose of the research and testing
● Appropriate language
● The right to withdraw
● Anonymity, data documentation, security and sharing
● Debrief
During design development, we also concern design ethics for moral behaviour and responsibilities. RTE Player is a high-quality content orientated product; we aim to create habit-forming products to improve the user’s mental well-being based on the ‘Hook Model’ by Nir Eyal. The long-term effects of designing an addictive product should leverage unconscious clues and hooks toward conscious behaviours. It helped us how to conduct the design process with the end-users of our product.
Reflection of the project
Research
Mostly, we conducted desktop research; there was a bit of room to improve in our research areas:
● Analytics to see browsing patterns
● Diary Studies to get a better understanding of watching behaviour
● Card Sort to organise the ordering of genres
Product
We had at least 5 design iterations but only ran 1 usability testing. Our team were satisfied with the overall testing results, and we would design a better product if we:
● More Ad hoc Testing on our design changes
● Prototyping with more real content and videos
● Look at the experience of receiving a notification or chat invite from RTE Players
Summary
There were limitations of collaboration due to working online — isolated individually but technically together. Of course, there was a bit of work to adapt to the system in the beginning. It was hard to gather everyone’s opinion. However, we respected each other’s work ethics, individual character, and personal values — healthy conflicts occurred to reduce biased one’s own opinions along the way.
We all have strengths and weaknesses in specific areas; we took different responsibilities outside our comfort zone to accept new roles. No one overlooked their task and responsibilities; all worked well in isolation with self-direction — not neglecting our project goal. We got some take away from everyone’s initiatives brought up into this project and generated positive outcomes.
Reference
Buchanan, R. (2020, February 20). Design Ethics. Encyclopedia. https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/design-ethics
Cuofano, G. (NA, NA, NA). The hook model and how to build an ethical product. FourWeekMBA. Retrieved 2021, from https://fourweekmba.com/hook-model/
