Odd-Jobs is an application dedicated to providing college students a readily available way to make money doing jobs that other people post. Work done during this phase was dedicated to designing a hub area for users to select and post jobs, while differentiating students from normal people.
During our research phase the first tool we used was a competitive analysis of our competitors. Hoping this would give us some insight into what they were doing, and what we could do better. We mainly looked at two competitors: Thumbtack and TaskRabbit. Using 5 categories we were able to determine that Thumbtack was the most “competitive” competitor.
The second tool we used was the UX team created user persona’s to get an idea of how users will interact with the app. Then we created scenarios in which they would need to use Odd Jobs to understand what their goals would be.
The final research method we used was a heuristic evaluation of Thumbtack. The purpose of this is to “grade” the app in how it works, how a user would interact with it, and how the app handles errors. We graded Thumbtack in 10 different categories across, App Design, App Logic, and User Controls. This gives us the opportunity to look at how the app works in a real user scenario.
Our findings through the competitive analysis were not as helpful as we thought since our original app idea was focused on students. As far as we could find, other apps are more broad and allow anyone to post or accept jobs. This did bring to our attention that we would need to decide where we wanted to take our app.
The use of personas and scenarios helped us understand who would be using our app and what their goals would be when interacting with our app. It also helped us figure out what we should focus on in our first split.
Before we continue I think it would be important to note that other apps allow anyone to post and accept jobs whereas Odd Jobs aims to serve students. The heuristic evaluation revealed to us that Thumbtack is a robust app which is lacking in very few areas. Earning high scores in most categories and only really faltered with a 6 in consistency and standards. We noted the app felt inconsistent with menus in different places depending on the page.
The UX team discovered that they need to lean more into the student focused aspect compared to the competitors who have a more broad focus. Ways to identify who is and is not a student will go a long way on achieving that focus, while also keeping in line with our personas and scenarios. Features also appealing to that student user base have brought to mind the idea of limiting the acceptable distance that users are willing to go to complete jobs and may be a focus of the second sprint.
The findings from the heuristic evaluation indicate a need to keep all operations of Odd-Jobs within one window and to keep menus in similar spaces to be consistent with our UI design. Along with that, there needs to be a way to limit the amount of jobs that users can post and or take to decrease the likelihood of unfinished or incomplete jobs.
Some caveats that our UX team has identified is that we have not gotten any actual user data to better understand the shortcomings of our current design. In addition to this, the personas and scenarios that have been created to better guide our work process are not based on real people, therefore they may not be representative of our user base. The heuristic evaluation that we did on a competitor was largely amateur and may have missed certain elements that make them better in some areas or worse in others. We are also going into this creation with the assumption that it will be confined to college campuses and their surroundings, which limits how many can use the application. Lastly, the competitors that we did a competitive analysis on cover a much wider range of tasks that can be done, while our current purpose is to provide a platform for college students, who may not have those skills.