Our Concept:

• Never miss a connection
  Sharing business cards can be a powerful, tangible first impression. CardShare pairs mobile platforms, such as phones and tablets, with your smartwatch to bring traditional networking practices and modern technology together.

• Make networking, hiring and applying for jobs easier.
  Grow a library of professional contacts and sort through applicants with ease.

Mood Board

To inspire the design of CardShare, our team collected images that focused on people and sharing through technology. We wanted to explore how devices like smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches fit into social contexts. We were also interested in how business meetings and career fairs are naturally structured, and where the technology currently comes into play.

Sketching out the Concept

Our idea began with sharing a business card via a swiping motion. Swiping the digital card towards a recipient sends the user's information to a recipient's device, prompting them to either accept or decline the offer to connect. Once accepted, the recipient's contact list is updated with the user's information. The receiver can reciprocate by swiping their card back to the original sender.

Sketching for Key Features

We wanted to include a design suite for the user to create and edit a business card or upload an existing card. Customization features should be easily accessible to newcomers while offering depth and flexibility to expert users.

Building Personas

To establish our target audience, we identified two areas for our application: Professional meetings and career fairs. From there, we explored how CardShare could assist different career fair attendees to develop two personas. Joe represents a relatively tech-savvy student attempting to find an internship, while Sally represents a recruiter early in her career, open to new HR solutions in order to track potential applicants.

Joe

• 18 years old.

• Undergraduate student in School of Business.

• Seeking a summer internship.

• Joe is planning to tackle his first career fair. He is goal-oriented and already involved as a student leader and athlete. One of his concerns is that he won't stand out to recruiters.

• Joe wears an Apple Watch primarily as a fitness tracker, which syncs up to his iPhone. He has some experience with keeping track of student organization members.

Scenario

Last Thursday, Joe decided last minute to attend his school’s job fair. He didn’t have time to print his business cards, so he downloaded a digital business card app advertised for the fair. Joe added and designed his digital business card through the app.

While at the fair, he talks to Sally about an internship opportunity at her company. Sally thinks he would be a good fit, so he sends her his card while talking about a job opportunity. Sally immediately receives information on her phone. The information on his card is saved in her app’s contact library without entering all the business-type information separately.

A week later, Sally is starting to coordinate interviews, and checks her app for candidates. She sees Joe’s card and can directly email him to set up an interview.

Key Tasks

Medium Fidelity Prototypes

In our digital narrative prototype, we included the screen of a user receiving someone else's contact information and the accept/decline feature. The mid-fi prototype covers only the sender's perspective.

One unique challenge of prototyping for a smartwatch involved matching the current capabilities of the technology. The watch application is meant to pair closely with mobile, providing a shortcut for sending and receiving information and housing an accessible, mirrored library of professional contacts.
We evaluated on two platforms: mobile and smartwatch.

You can follow these links to use and navigate our prototypes.

Smart Watch Prototype

User Test Plan Objectives

1. Evaluate the overall user experience as a point of reference for building a high fidelity prototype.

2. Identify unmet user needs by better understanding the considerations consumers undergo when accomplishing networking and recruiting-related tests.

Account and Card Creation

1. How well does the design match the participant's mental model?

2. What are the design patterns consumers consistently resonate with?

Card Exchange

1. How well do participants understand how to exchange information?

2. What aspects of card exchange work well for consumers?

3. What issues do consumers experience when using CardShare?

Participants and Procedures for User Testing

P1: Michael
Age: 45
Occupation: IT Professor
Use Case: Active networker in many social and professional settings.
Has used card sharing applications in the past.

P2: Maddie
Age: 27
Occupation: Manager at the YMCA After School Program Supervisor.
Use Case: A frequent networker who attends many professional training events.

P3: Rogesh
Age: 24
Occupation: An employee at YMCA After School Program.
Use Case: Uses applications for everything.
Frequent networker for personal and professional settings.

Results

Account Setup

All participants created an account successfully and used the personal text fields to input their information, rather than by linking through a third party like LinkedIn because of security trust reasons and because two participants didn’t have a LinkedIn Account.

Business Card Creation

One user preferred an explicit link on the homepage to create a new card. However, one participant had used apps where “edit” was used to edit the existing information and lead the user to creating something new. And finally, one user went to “My Cards” to add a new card.

Mobile Card Exchange

Most users were able to easily find the card sharing aspect of the application. While the mid-fi prototype did not allow for actual swiping, users were able to send their cards. One wanted more clarity when selecting a person to send the card to and another wanted more information in the confirmation of the sent card.

Smart Watch

Users were able to send the card both within the mobile and smartwatch applications. However, users felt the two task didn’t line up in the different device.

General Feedback

Different opinions and suggestions arose about the home page. P2 was distracted by too many recent cards and suggested it be moved to the bottom of the page. Some users tried to click on what they perceived to be blank cards to start building a new one.

High Fidelity Prototype

The team incorporated results and feedback into hi-fi prototypes on two channels.
We focused on establishing consistency between the mobile and smartwatch platforms, including additional security measures, and improving the organization of CardShare to better align with user expectations.

Click below to use the Axure prototype.

Hi-Fi Mobile Prototype

Addressing User Issues

Security
To address issues with security, we implemented the following changes in our hi-fi prototype:

Account
To better align with user expectations, we made changes to links and labels. We hoped to improve navigation and use clearer language.

• Changed “Edit Cards” to “My Personal Cards” — put all personal information under “Account”.

• Hi-fi homepage now hosts a library with space for the user’s personal cards and cards they receive.

Sending a Card
The hi-fi prototype aims to better align the design of the mobile and smartwatch platforms with familiar assets. We revised our send interaction to better guide the user.

Closing

As a team, we discovered a lot about the prototyping process. Personally, for me, I found that the process mimicked a lot of what I learned as a graphic designer. Starting off with concept sketches and then bringing those concepts alive with digital design tools was very familiar for me. Design iteration, much like within the graphic design field, was essential to both creating a solid design that solved our problem and was aesthetically pleasing. We wanted to make sure we serviced the user first and foremost, so testing our product against a target market was our main focus right after creating the prototype with Axure RP design software.

One of the most valuable things we learned, beyond the methodology and process of prototype development, was how valuable a prototype is to our stakeholders. It allows them to see firsthand a tangible design without investing a large amount of capital in backend development, only to find that parts of the design either don’t work or aren’t favored by consumers.

Thank you for reading through this case study of prototype development and user testing.