interface prototype 7 & 8

The 7&8 application prototypes of the online identity management service are mainly built for thinking deep how the system works and how people may interact with it.

During the process, a detailed persona “Emma” is generated for the mock-up which contains Emma’s profiles for different online social purposes and her full personal attributes. It’s a good practice to fill in Emma’s personal data and organize them into profiles to see how the system actually works. In prototype 7, more interaction skills of Axure are learned, including dynamic panels and drag & drop with boundary effects.

(interface prototype 7)

(interface prototype 8)

The prototype 8 moves further on structure and layout design. This practice prepares a lot for the final app mock-up and lets me know how to concern more details of the interactions. Size and format issue of materials is also an important lesson I learned from the prototype. And with these two prototypes I will be able to quickly build the high-fidelity app mock-up accurately as soon as the visual interface design is determined.

Service system mapping

Here is my mapping of the service system. I put user journeys, front-stages, back-stages and future concepts together in this big map to see from users’ point of view with a systemic thinking of all components of the service:

Blueprint update 2013/07/09

Here is the new blueprint based on the interface I’m designing for the service. It contains several different user journeys in various contexts and covers the physical evidences, front-stages, back-stages and supports of the whole service system:

In the next stage research, I need to confirm how the front-stages and back-stages service processes work with appropriate supports. And I found it’s very hard to visualize the whole service systemically with one blueprint because it contains many scenarios. Therefore I’m trying to use another approach to map the whole service system.

Interface prototype 5 & 6

Based on the feedback from users, I developed the fifth and sixth interface prototype of the online identity management system. For these two prototypes, I used Axure RP, an interactive html prototype tool, to mock up the interface experience. Axure is mainly used for websites and apps but I used it to generate desktop interface because it’s easy to build links and generate interactive prototypes through the tool.

Axure RP is easy to start and it supports various ways to generate a prototype. I mainly used fast sketches  to build the whole interface for the early prototypes (there are many widget options in Axure). The fifth interface prototype is mainly for experiencing and learning Axure with slight improvements from the fourth one. And the sixth was structurally developed for further user tests.

With the html mock up, I experienced the truer interface and asked other people to test. From the feedback I integrated some functions to reduce repetitive operations, make the interface more concise and easier to understand.

(generating the prototype with Axure RP)

With the help of an article from UED Baidu, I successfully put the html prototype into iOS. It’s easier to take one iPad with me and find people to test the interface.

From the feedback of these two prototypes, I learned that people can understand the way organizing their personal information and profiles in this system and find that it will benefit them with sync updates and re-link accounts when they have different requirements and need to make changes. Also, making all activities of users and interactions with others in one page will save much time for them. They also like the idea to have a vault to save passwords and other data of the accounts. But they mostly concerned the security of this system, if the system is strongly linked to users’ specific devices or provides dynamic authentication methods, people might feel safer to store and use personal data with the new service.

Previous research quick review – 07/05

Here is the quick review of my previous research of this project. This project is called Multiple Online Identity Management. If we divide the project name into three words and re-link them again then we can see the systemic picture of how I developed the new service- from people’s motivations, behaviors and needs to how I tried transform those insights into the service generation.

Interface prototype 3.0 & 4.0

The third prototype explores more of the interface details of how users may operate in a desktop application. It’s a quick prototype for me catching what the service system may look like and how to layout the functions.

After that, I find profile management is one main function in this system and I experienced different profile pages in various sites to find out the common requirements and differences to build profiles online. It helps me to better organize the functions and modules in the interface. Based on that, I developed the fourth prototype:

It has clearer sketches for testing with people. The paper interfaces are cut in shapes to let people operate and mock-up the experience of it.