Afterglow

Interior Design App

About

Afterglow Interior Design App

Year: 2024
Role: UX designer leading the Afterglow's store app design
Responsibility: Conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, iterating on designs and responsive design.


This project was for my specialization course in UX Design, by Google. This app is designed for interior design items, that focuses on how a user, who is color blind, partially blind, or completely blind, uses an e-commerce app.

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"User Experience Design, when applied to vital services and social causes, can change the world."
- Amber Stechyshyn, Springboard

UX for social Good

Some careers are entirely focused on helping people. Think about teachers, police, nurses, doctors, firefighters and social workers, they are not directly aiming to help people. They are just doing their jobs but indirectly affecting and helping out others' lives in better way. User experience design falls into this category. Learning and practicing good user experience requires a degree of empathy with your users and understanding exactly how you can solve their problems. Good UX design can have a significant positive impact on the world. By focusing their talents, UX designers can make meaningful changes and drive towards social good.
This is a try to create an e-commerce application with multiple accessibility features that eases the buying process for blind people.

Understanding the User

Kickoff Study

Shopping is a very vast topic and enjoyable to every person. Evidently, some items need minutiae to view like cars, sofa color and design, carpet color, and many others, which is a challenging task for a blind person to purchase. That's why I took the challenge and thoughtfully researched different types of blindness and how an application can change it. There are some key points to focus on before taking the research into consideration.
This application is for all the users but it is made extra accessible with some features such that a blind user can also operate easily.
I started my initial study by understanding and answering some HMW (How Might We) questions and some important impactful questions like,
How might we make the e-commerce more useful?
How do blind people purchase goods online?
Who do we see as our greatest competitors?
Can AI mounted features solve the issues for blind?

Users & Audience

The dominant target users of the e-commerce app are blind people, I'm designing it to keep them front and center. But, with them all the other group of people will get benefit and might use these accessibility features more. I took 3 different personas and assumed their core needs and frustrations according to the opinions of some interviewed users.

Meet the Users


User Pain points

Complex Designs
Color visibility issues for partially blind
No purchase help and search assistance
Can't get the discription if completely blind

Competitive Analysis

I looked at several potential competing companies, and although none of them compete directly with Afterglow, they can still infringe on the business' revenue & popularity. All the competitions are providing the same feature, some of the new features I included are listed in the UI Design section.

Starting the design

The Design Journey

After collecting the analysis data from the initial study, creating the problem statement, and finalizing the pain points of the users in the prior steps, I moved to the ideation phase where I used the infamous Crazy 8's ideation techniques. I created 3 to 4 crazy 8's user flow and out of them I selected one. Then I created a user journey map of what a basic start to finish journey looks like while ordering an item. It helps in understanding ways users can interact with the product, as well as allowing us to see navigation through user goals. Then wireframed each screen on paper. Followed by a digital wireframe I joined the basic screens to make a meaningful flow of the user path.


The Usability Study Findings

From the usability study conducted in interviews, I came to know some more insights. People from various fields tested the prototype, by which different perspectives gave rise to some insights.
Inaccessible Navigation
Non-Responsive Design
Complex Checkout Processes
Inaccessible Multimedia Content

Userflow

Refining the design

Mockups

Style Guide


Going Forward

Key Takeaway

I always wondered how online e-commerce stores worked and the more interesting fact to hear is blind people tend to purchase more goods online than a normal human. That's why as a part of the design for social good I selected the topic to design a viable solution for the problem. Thus I created Afterglow.
The first thing which was the key takeaway from this project was that learning and practicing a good user experience requires a degree of empathy with your users and a good UX design can have a significant positive impact on the world.
I have used a user-centered approach for designing the application. I also understood that not every user has the same perspective on a problem. I learned how small elements are important and they contribute to making a big difference. I understood the need of having heterogeneous user groups, making a more effective product experience.
On top of it, empathizing with the minority group and creating an impactful design is way more fruitful for even other users.
Hope to learn more amazing things 😇.
Be sure to check out the process for Afterglow Interior Design's creation below!