This Spring, in my final semester in my Master of Science (in Communication Data Science) at University of Southern California, I had the pleasure of having Jaime Levy as my Professor for UX Strategy and Design. She is one of the trail blazers of digital media and has written a great book called “UX Strategy: How to design innovative digital products people want.” Her classes are informative, challenging, and an absolute riot. We all worked incredibly hard, producing a new element of our product and presenting it week after week, and I had the most fun of my entire Masters program.
The product idea I worked on is called TAPLA, which I imagined to be the new Go Metro App. You could re-load your card and get route maps etc, but most importantly, you can find cool stuff to do on the Metro train and bus routes! And you get rewarded for using it!
Throughout the semester, I “got out the the building” and decided to “move fast and break stuff” ! I conducted customer research at Culver City, finding 10 kind volunteers to interview. I reviewed the marketplace, looking at Go Metro app, and competitors who provide navigation, experience discovery and those like Yelp and Discover LA who provide both. I made an interactive prototype in Adobe XD and recruited 5 people to give me live feedback on it in an interview (Jaime calls this guerilla research). I built a landing page to drive app downloads and then ran 4 Facebook campaigns.
I had mixed success in terms of conversions but I learned a lot!
1st lesson: really know your value proposition and be able to articulate it leftside, rightside, forwards, backwards, upside down and underwater.
2nd lesson: make sure all copy and images express the value prop or you will waste time and money sending people to your site who are just not interested in your product i.e. dont use a bikini clad woman if you aren’t selling bikinis.
3rd lesson: talking to potential customers is the best part of the job! Don’t be afraid, people are so lovely (I was paying them but I think they are just lovely anyway).
Final lesson: Adobe XD is really flexible and gives you interactive prototypes you can video and share easily, it’s really worth learning.
You can view my finished Adobe prototype here: https://xd.adobe.com/view/649fe0c1-d295-416a-42ec-003b7b58c84c-12ae/?fullscreen
My final presentation is below. Enjoy!
Tracy Keys 