The challenge

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One thing every creative professional has in common is that they are always observing the world seeking for inspiration. There are many ways to organize information and there are various types of input that can trigger innovation and creative thinking.

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Create a tool for designers and creative people, so that they can safely save pieces of inspiration and trace them back in an efficient way when they need to.

I know those people who cannot help themselves when encountering something that inspires their minds. They will take a photo, write a note or just brag until someone notices what they found.

Creatives!

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I know this because I am one of the kind. Infinite screenshots on the gallery, two notes’ apps, and photos & videos only I can understand. But even if I have my own ideas for a tool to save pieces of inspiration, this would not be a UX exercise if I didn’t research the problem.

To begin with my research phase, I outlined the questions to whom I needed to know the answers.

I believe that designing the questions beforehand is an important detail because it maintains us focused on what we really need to understand and prevents us to waste the interviewed person’s time.

As I had very little time to complete the exercise, I have not done any one-to-one interviews. Instead, I created an online survey on Typeform and shared it with creative professionals through social networks. 

After one day of launching the survey, I organized the answers on a table and colored the words/ideas in common to help me perceive the pattern of my users' needs and difficulties.

Reading the pattern I understood that there were two types of users: one that is a more organized person and one that is not organized and even likes a bit of chaos.

With this, I created the first draft of personas: Milen and Robi.

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Milen [answers from 2,3,6]

Creative professional that saves up inspirational bits she finds through her day and capable of organizing/categorizing some of them.

Milen is a middle-high organized person and wants to use our tool for a quick and categorized saving task and easy access to the memories/inspiration pieces, using the categories.

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Robi [answers from 1,4,5,7]

Robi is a creative professional who collects a lot of inspirational pieces and isn’t capable of organizing it. He isn’t a very selective creative; likes to have big amounts of “random” information and feel surprised when going through his collections, but doesn’t want to undergo every memory he has saved. He likes that chaos but also wants to organize some of his memories in a simple way.

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Having this, I converged both in one type of user and created a Persona: Romi.

Having a Persona really helps on the procedure, because now I had Romi’s needs and goals in mind not only with a users’ data collection view but with a more empathetic view, due to having a whole personality knowledge.

Empathy is a super easy and natural ability for me, but it seems that Personas can really help when working with developers or other more technical colleagues. Not saying that they aren’t capable of empathy [my husband is a DevOps] but they have no contact with the user, and Personas is just an easy way to present to them the users' needs.

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After this, it was time to design the use cases. There were only two use cases:

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1. Saving a piece of inspiration

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2. Searching for one saved before

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I’m not a fan of using paper [waste waste waste] but as this was the first time sketching use cases I wanted to visualize rapidly what I had in mind.

Then, it was time to put it on digital.

Having it, I could now sketch the app interface.

Again and for the same reason, I had a few tries on paper first.

I thought it would be easier and I’d waste only one page, but I needed three to finally have a workable sketch.

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It was now time for a digital (and proper) wireframe. 

There are many tools to help us wireframing, as I’m new here I tried out some and chose to go with InVision Freehand.

This is not my best work but, as I said before, I had little time to finish the exercise and still there was something I had no idea how to do: prototyping.

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Of course, I have read that word many times but wasn’t able to tell the difference between wireframing and prototyping. So I searched and learned.

Once again, there are many tools where we can prototype. After reading some more articles and watching Youtube videos I chose Figma.

I designed all the frames and only then I started to add the connections. 

Figma’s Documentation was a real help, it’s very well documented, everything is very accessible.

Here is the clickable prototype presentation.

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I look at this and I do not see an app that I would find in the app store, but it is what I can do with the knowledge I have and really hope that in a couple of months I can point out everything I did wrong and how to improve all the procedure.