Digital Contractor

overview

The project was like a brilliant opportunity for me to show my design skills to the outer world, till the best I could. The team has already an idea and they have done almost all the market research, I was there to give a form to the idea. The team aimed for providing all the materials, labor, equipment and engineering & services, necessary for the building up of a project. The primary goals is to solve the problems of time management, tasks scheduling, work compliance, improving the work ethic in the respective site of work. The UX design here lies within the model of UX psychology, UX strategy and methods, User centric, Informational designs and design models. To design for an audience who can actually be benefitted, was something great experience to learn about.

Problem statement

The major problems includes - Scheduling/ time management/ availability problems among the project members. Document management problems of orders, invoices, employee applications, certification of insurance, order changes etc. Changing minds of homeowners, who want changes in the middle of the project, may forgot the requests they have made. Lack of communications, for exchange of important information among group members. Unreliable subcontractors, make sure they carry a general liability insurance and the blame games.

Roles and responsibilities

I was a part of 5 member design team, including me 4 were the designers and 1 was the design lead. My daily responsibilities includes user researches, survey conduction, conceptualization, designing and preparing assets for the developer team. Some additional responsibilities includes prototyping and testing the design phases for proper designing & functioning and providing necessary information to the developers team. I designed and worked on the UI design elements and user research.

Research and validation

Conducted a survey with around 50+ people working on the site. The aim was to validate the assumptions regarding the problems faced by the work holders, and to discover the other problems they might be facing. Data to validate assumptions - 70% of the people found that, the working management on the spot areas is quite a difficult task to operate and the improper/unequal distribution of working channels. The pain points identified are- Inefficient data collection handling, lack of reliable communication/collaboration and information flow and the records of money transactions and shifts.

Understanding users

Field interviews and research were carried out to understand the different aspects of their business and frustration. After researches it was known that how difficult the tasks were. The works was still continuing on pen and paper basis so as to keep the records and the management ethics. Based on the data's received feature sets were developed.

Feature set

Based on the research's and understanding the pain points and the model, I started to develop the primary feature set of the app.

Sketching /ideation and low fidelity models

The thoughts and the ideas were directly put on the paper roughly, whatever was clicking so as to get a direction in which the results are going to be shaped. The sketches and ideas were directly converted into low fidelity frames in the thought process which help us to put all the necessary information and flow all together without any visual design, which later on converted to the high fidelity models. The wireframes/designs were validated with the design lead before proceeding to the detail design stage.

High Fidelity screens

Existing layout and typography were used during the whole project to maintain the sync with the existing model.

Conclusion

Overall this was a great learning opportunity for me as because this was my first experience of working in a team of designers and developers, to design something that is really applicable to the real world. You can find this app in the playstore, named as digital contractor. I found this internship among a group of friends who are really willing to do something for the society. At the end I can say that I am more confident about the learnings and work ethics that I learned from this start-up and definitely gained a level up position in terms of my thinking, analytical methods and user research processes. It will be relaunched again soon with better designs iterations. The team is still working on the UX-UI part to make it more interactive and simpler to use. Really thankful to the team and the Innover labs for this opportunity.