My role on the team

I have acted as the content manager during Junior year (Fall of 2018 - Spring of 2019) and as the Research lead during Senior year (Spring of 2019 - Spring of 2020) and worn many hats throughout the process.

As the research lead of Boldly, I had the role of finding ways to gain reliable user insights to analyze and incorporate in our app in order to ensure that the experience is as intuitive as possible. In order to gather valuable information, I conducted user interviews, planned user brainstorm exercises, set up usability testing scripts, and created feedback surveys. The research that I conducted was particularly important in guiding us during the early stages of conceptualizing new features, as well as in the later stages when we were able to focus on fully polishing the interface and overall flow of the app. Due to the overlap between research and design processes I collaborated with the design lead to assist in the integration of users’ responses into the solutions. Part of my work with the design team was creating iconography that I tested with users to make a more friendly experience.

Before Boldly I had never worked on a project that lasted for more than a school year, so there have been a lot of lessons and experiences that I took away from it. Over the course of this project, I learned about collaboration, communication, and repetition. In order to maximize the insights we took away from user exercises, I have learned that there are good times to take a more collaborative approach than traditional usability testing. I had to strategize to figure out when to use these methods and my challenge was to find a way to make users feel comfortable contributing their ideas. Most importantly, I had to structure the testing and make continuous revisions to documents so that our process could be repeated over and over until we reached the desired results.