Shepherding the Lost Sheep
Encourage users to cultivate their faith
Faith is so important to many people to sustain themselves in this exceedingly chaotic world. Each individual’s experience with and perception of faith is so unique, how do we create a resource to encompass those who need it? That is why we’re spending so much time and resources to dive deep into the users’ psyche.
Establishing Inclusivity via User Personas
With religion being a polarizing topic itself, we wanted to approach the creation of this with much consideration and sensitivity. Therefore, we wanted to encompass everyone and anyone who may benefit from using an app.
Personas can be categorized... but which do we choose?
Life Stages
- High School
- College
- Single and working
- Young married couple
- Married couple with children
- Settled with adult children
- Retired
Struggles
- Financial
- Social pressure
- Mental health
- Lack of resources
- Lack of motivation
- Work ethics
- School stresses
Level of Faith
- Exploring
- New believer
- Long-term believer
- Apathetic
- Dissonant
Life Stages - encompasses more relatable struggles
In the end we decided life stages is the best method to categorize our potential users because it can encompass many struggles that may relate to their age and generation.
Why we used an unconventional route - creating user personas before user interviews
1) We already have a basic understanding of the overall users
2) Streamline identifying the real problem
3) Help us target those who can benefit from this app the most
Each persona was given a general scaffold: demographic/ background, vague problems, broad personality. Again, this helps encompass the life stage and struggles. The next step is to fill in the scaffold with more details by having volunteers empathize with this user and determine the users’ thoughts and behavior.
Understanding the user persona at a deeper dimension that truly reflects real people
Empathy Mapping
Organized categories helps us identify the main conflicts
Identifying the day to day pain points of our users to truly understand the scope of the problem we're solving
To further complete our user’s story, our team completed a journey mapping of each user, narrating a story of their day-to-day. This is to ensure that we truly understand the users and help them solve their problems.
Ok... now how do we prioritize the pain points??
In order to determine how to allocate our efforts and which problems to address first we
Identified questions and concerns and listed them according to the level of risk and certainty
The higher the risk, the higher the priority. The higher the uncertainty, the less we are sure about how true the problem is.
Sometimes our personas aren't accurate. How do we account for that?
To hone in and define more accurately on who our users are, we created:
1) Filter survey
2) Discussion guide
While scripting this, we carefully worded each question to discover what we want to know about the users while taking consideration on wording that may or may not be offensive.
Learning from our Mistakes - out with the old
Improving our future UI by identifying weak points in our current app
We currently have an early version of a spiritual app you can find on your app store (TJC-IA) that we have done a heuristics evaluation on. This helps us identify current strengths and weaknesses we can later incorporate into our new app.
