User Research

The initial draft of shorthand was used to seek feedback from 4 different users. These users belonged to the target audience of graduate students who are expected to finish their degree within the next one year.

Purpose - The idea behind this user research is to understand whether the story arc present in the draft is able to create a sense of curiosity in the users who are the target audience for this story. Further, through this first-hand conversation about the short hand draft, I would also be able to seek feedback on various visualizations and whether or not they are supporting the overall narrative.

Audience & Demographics - The story that I am pursing currently is around the job expectations in corporate culture and how students who are graduation might not be ready for it. The main piece I am focusing on is around long hours, prevalence of stress, and negative health outcomes in high-paying jobs. For this, I recruited 3 different students who are going to graduate in the next couple of months and an another student who is graduating next year. These students were of different age, non-native, and held different sexual identities.

Research Protocol - The interview constituted of two parts: A brief walk through of the storyboard followed by few qualitative questions.

Q1 - Could you talk to be about your first impressions?

Q2 - Can you explain to me what you took away from this storyboard?

Q3 - After going through, are there any lingering questions that you want answered?

Q4 - Are the different sections doing justice to the overall message? If not, what would you improve?

Q5 - What do you think about the images, typography, and the theme ?

Feedbacks & Insights -

Feedback 1 - The typefaces are inconsistent
Pointed out by 2 of the 4 users interviewed. “Why are you not using Serif for headings and Sans for text across the article”

Insight 1 - Easy to follow storyline. The chronology of sections was doing a good job in advancing the story.

All the users interviewed were able to quickly explain what the story was trying to communicate.

Insight 2 - The call to action is not addressing concerns that are being highlighted in the story.

3 of the 4 users interviewed pointed this out. “…I get that stress is prevalent, now I would like to see ways in which I can deal with it, you know.”

Feedback 2 - The images and text together are at times not working.

Feedback 3 - The visualization in white background with highlights in orange is highly contrasting when the sections are in orange.

Insight 3 - The visualization are making some of the text redundant and can thus be dropped.

Feedback 4 - Maybe include more content on Stress and how it affects us.

Scope for Iteration

Through the feedback and insights from the 4 interviews, I was able to categorize my work for the next part of the project in 2 major buckets.

Visual communication -

Decide on a typography and stay consistent with it through different sections. Look at minimizing instances of text over images or use high contrasting images.

The text body should be in the middle vs left aligned and finally can experiment with changing the background of visualizations.

Storyline /Structure -

Cutdown on the text to avoid repetitive content. Elaborate more on Stress and how it affects younger adults. Re-think the information around call to action and include ways in which stress can be managed locally or preemptively.