KNOTS: ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR KNITTERS
AIM:
My aim for this app is to be community for artists share their patterns and projects and be a safe space for beginners to learn new skills. I want this app to get more people involved in the knitting community and help them find a new life long hobby.
Introduction and Background:
When I was generating ideas for this module, I knew I wanted community to be at the heart of it, so I decided to brainstorm my ideas around that word. I wanted to create a community that translated well onto an app as well as solve a problem for the people in that community. I landed on the idea of creating an app for knitters primarily as well as other fibre artists as a platform to share their projects and a place to teach beginners and share advice. The skill of our grandmother’s pastime has gone under a resurgence with 7.3 million Britain’s knowing how to knit. In a paper called “How knitting became cool” it states, "as a creative outlet with therapeutic benefits, it has proven to be a trending activity in life under lockdown for people of various ages and backgrounds." (George, 2020).
EMPATHISE:
The empathise stage consisted of 6 user interviews with users who knit and crochet as well as 3 diary study participants who had never knit or crochet before starting the study. the results from these interviews were collected and sorted into an affinity diagram; to look for groups and links from the questions asked.
DEFINE:
The insights from the interviews and affinity diagram were used to create three distinct personas: The novice, the intermediate and the expert. The use of personas was very insightful as a way to get into the mind of the user through user stories and narrative scenarios.
IDEATE:
The ideation process follows many different ideating techniques such as rapid idea generation, how might we questions, 6 up templates etc. to produce new ideas ready for the prototyping stage. these ideas and initial features were put into a NUF test as well as compared to direct competitors such as Raverly and Dreamknit.
PROTOTYPE:
The main features picked for this wire-frame are: homepage, upload, tutorials and profile. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible as to not confuse the user or over-complicate the premise of the app.
https://www.figma.com/proto/V7lp5vsa3BRZNjJVH7sCAm/KNOTS?type=design&node-id=26-4700&t=mRbLpd5ocJHHuPqw-0&scaling=scale-down&page-id=1%3A4&starting-point-node-id=26%3A4700&show-proto-sidebar=1
style guide for the high fidelity prototype
TESTING:
The purpose of conducting a 5 act interview was to be able to test my high fidelity prototype to potential users and gain honest feedback on the highlights and pain points of the prototype. Recording the interviews and creating an affinity diagram from the transcript allowed me to gain a clearer understanding of the feedback and know how to more forward in future re-designs.
