Simpresent
Project background:
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Presentation is a way to show other people the presenter’s unique idea about one thing, this should be the best way to let one person’s personality shine. But many people always want to run away from this.
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Getting nervous before an oral presentation is quite common, this may cause poor and messy preparation. Bad sleeping quality and lively mood. When the presentation is happening, anxiety will make the presenter lost their mind then mess up the whole presentation.
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Project goal:
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The choice of solution for this project background was widely, but after my research and investigation of this problem pattern, I believe that mobile application is the best way to solve this human behaviour pattern under such modern quick social rhythm.
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Project Duration:
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2021.08 - 2021.11
Main challenge
Before the project, I already know that there are many tutorials and guides online. If people really want to learn how to avoid nervous or improve their presentation skills, they CAN find the right way, no matter free tutorials/guides or payment needed professional training. The key issue here is, people are escaping from their own inner, they don’t want to face the reality, which cause them lack of motivation to become a better presenter. What I am facing is, find the correct way to active people’s motivation to improve themselves.
Secondary Research
As my early hypothetical, I thought only young adults who speaking second-language will have this issue. I went to check how professional (which also means payment needed) service in presentation area deal with is pattern. I found young adults have weak self-esteem and self-confidence is because they care too much ‘being alone among their social circle’. Therefore, they will be afraid of failure in presentation, start becoming nervous and anxiety before a presentation. Which also means, not only young people will have this kind of issue, but all the people who is shy among their social circle or just having weak self-esteem.
This lead to a behaviour vioral psychology theory, when people got a failure presentation, and their self-esteem is damaged, they feel scare and lonely, this is a negative punishment to their mind, which lead to their negative behavior. What I need to do in this project is to transfer this negative punishment to negative reinforcement, as inspired from the research, if people won’t feel alone, and they don’t feel ‘sad’ after each time they fail, even got more motivation to improve themselves, that’s a negative reinforcement to their mind.
On YouTube, just type presentation fails, the result and view numbers shows this kind of thinking is in many people’s mind. People can truly relax their mind and get good mood from this kind of video. This made me create the core concept of this project. ‘Self-deprecating humour’, I want to create a mobile platform to let people see other people’s failure presentation videos. They can find the mentioned social belonging. I hope self-deprecating humour can help users re-gain the motivation to improve themselves on public speaking skills. During this process, they can upload their own presentation videos to gain comments, feedback even laugh from strangers. Therefore, they can build a stronger self-esteem, to achieve a strong self-confidence in the future.
Primary Research
'Reduce tension and lead to feeling of relief'
'It can elicit languor and positive emotions, and thus contribute to the release of tension in critical situaition'
We focus here on self-deprecating humour. This type is the most suitable for releasing built-up tension'
Self-deprecating presentation is an action that expects a positive evaluation from others'
I find these academic supports to see if self-deprecating works, the result is self-deprecating can help people body and mental nervous and seeking positive feedback from other people. Especially this first one, it explains effeteness of the self-deprecating in service working, similar with public speaking.
Concept interviews - Mental mode
Interview settings
Before the interview starts, I introduce the base concept (like the video is about failure presentation, and there will be a place to let people share and ask anthing about presention skills) of my product to the participants. And I only set two question about video feature, and one about the discuss place. Because I think the discuss place is very like a forum, and I don’t need to question such a successful concept, I just need to know their attitude about name privacy.
Results
Key findings
Other failure videos
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I notice the platform can provide other failure as well, as mentioned in the research stage two, people are also enjoy other life area failure videos. Since now the main goal is to help people get motivation. Then why not?
Custom profile setting
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Since each person will have different option on name privacy, I will just set the profile to self-decided. User can decide to show their username or not at any moment and any where.
Competitor analysis
Good points
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- Fullly A.I. feedback (for people cares name privacy)
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- Detailed analysis/feedback
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- Provide small lessons based on presentation feedback
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- Provide different practive ways
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- Special moment for user’s presentation
Weak points
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- Fullly A.I. feedback (for people don’t cares name privacy)
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- Payment needed
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- No rewards system
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- Can’t communicate with real people
Weak points
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- Feedback not very detailed
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- Payment needed
Good points
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- Provide small and quick tips
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- Able to track improve
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- Able to form a group with friends, then share improvement
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- Provide library as study resource
Define
Storyboard
Empathy map
Pain & Gain map
Some learning from here
For people who are nervous about speaking, mindset is most important, and after being affected by the mindset of a failed presentation, they are less likely to look back on their failures and learn from them
Personas​
Based on my interview, I created these two personas. But the main following is stick with the first persona, since the first one is my main target group, who has waker self-esteem and less self-confidence.
Experience map follows persona one
Looking for detailed solutions
Since this part has rich content of early period research, I didn’t tun How Might We progress, but try the small scale of crazy 8s with forced ranking to find a functional idea for my concept.
Card sort testing
Testing results
As I found my solutions, which are my application features. I still run one last texting to see how user’s behaviour can fit with my features.
Wireflow
Paper (digital) prototyping
Because of COVID-19, I can’t get in touch with other person, I just use the wireflow to run the prototyping test. Just a simple test to see if user can make their way to the core feature of this application, which is upload their own video of failure presentation.
Task flow
User flow
Usability testings
Since I learned the design principles of making interface. I design these testing basing on some of those principles. Therefore, I can make sure my features are not only simple structure, but they are simple to use for my users.
Sketching and prototyping
Since my features and ideas have now been proved by users and those testings. I now will start sketching and making the prototype.
What can my application change and deliver?
Which is what I can show to the users. I also set up an ‘after-product experience map’ to show my users, my clients and my co-partner what my application can do. This is most direly way to showcase the outcome.
Production showcase
Personal reflection and project summary
This problem pattern could have other ways to solve, using UI/UX is not the only way. But after long-period research and considering, I still pick to use UI/UX skills to create a mobile application, I also see this as a chance to really use what I learn during these three years. This can be count as my first active production UX project.
For this project itself, I would say I ‘DO’ want to improve its UI, as well as its prototyping and flows. Since this project is more about concept and feature, I didn’t do Axure prototyping. But I would hope I can have chance to do a high fidelity prototyping of it as well. In addition to that, I would like to improve my interviewing skills. Since the UX project started to involve interviews, we have been stuck indoors due to COVID-19, and I hope to interview more people in the future with offline contacts to get more useful information and produce better persona.
