THIS IS
TATTRACK
A motion, grip, and strain-sensing arm band designed to pair seamlessly with our app to track and improve wrist health while promoting career longevity.
Project overview
Over the course of 10 weeks our team studied tattoo artists to find design opportunities to improve their experience tattooing.
USER RESEARCh
Interviews
Understanding Tattoo Artists
Our research consisted of two components: semi-structured interviews and competitive analysis. Every team member interviewed one tattoo artist, each from different experiences and backgrounds. We asked a wide range of questions about their profession, from working with clients to explaining each part of their process, in order to understand the artists as well as we could. Starting a project with almost no knowledge of the user group and how they do what they do, we were curious to learn everything we could to find the best design opportunity. Afterwards, we came together to discuss major themes that our interviews shared. To help make sense of all of this information, we wrote down some of our major findings on sticky notes and grouped them together in categories. Some major commonalities we found were irregular and varying work hours, and physical pain on the job.
Read our interviews below:
Each of the team members also completed a competitive analysis, researching what products were already out there to help tattoo artists. While searching we found that not many products were targeted specifically for our user group other than products necessary for their profession. Because of this we looked at a wide range of products that might help our two problem areas. From this research we were excited to create something in such a new space with inspirations from different products.
USER PERSONAS
Representing the Artists
Based off of our findings from our user interviews, we synthesized an archetypal representation of our users. During the creation of our personas we were careful not to make assumptions and based our criteria on our user interviews. We included characteristics that we considered the most important, and made our personas realistic by mimicking the personality and pain points of our interviewees.
Throughout the rest of our project, we came back to these documents often to make sure we were following our original goals - not stereotypes or assumptions.
Contextual inquiry
Finding More Answers
Feeling like we didn’t have all the answers we needed, our team completed a contextual inquiry session, observing a tattoo artist working with their client. From this, we were able to understand some of the processes we had heard about in our interviews. As she tattooed, we asked her to explain what she was doing and asked deeper questions that we missed during our initial interviews. From this session, we learned that physical pain really was an important issue to focus on, and we were able to move forward more confidently with this idea.
Ashley Nicholas tattooing her client with a rotary machine
Journey map
A Day in the Life
In order to better visualize our users' pain points throughout the day we created a user journey map. We focused on two main emotions: happiness and frustration. Within our graph there were 5 points when frustration was particularly high, and we thought these may be niches we could design to help tattoo artists. These niches include designing a tattoo in a style the artist wasn’t comfortable with, communicating ideas with the client, experiencing back pain from hunching over, feeling sore wrists, and the client fidgeting during the tattooing session. Although most of these pain points were derived from our interviews, we did have to make some assumptions about how big of an issue it was for the artist.
Designtime
design requirements
How can we...
After analyzing the research data and building a better understanding of the life of tattoo artists, we started to look at what requirements our users needed to fulfill their goals. As a result, we created 10 design requirements, and then broke down each requirement further. This allowed us to comprehend our user group more, while also exploring areas that may potentially need iteration or design changes.
Storyboards
Better Visualizing Experiences
During this process, we each developed two storyboards for two different experiences based off possible problems that came up from the design requirements. Consequently, we explored a wide range of design solutions to tackle these problems. Creating storyboards helped us better visualize how users would interact and react to the design solutions we each brainstormed. Although we approached multiple requirements, such as learning new styles, we found that our solutions for wrist pain were the most compelling and made the most difference for our user’s experience.
Hand Drawn
Photos
info architecture
Time to Organize
Now that we agreed to address wrist pain, we had to focus on mapping our design solutions into a clear hierarchy. We broke down our hierarchy into the grip, wristband, setup, and user interface for the mobile application. We utilized a color hierarchy to distinguish between the different categories and various arrows to highlight different interactions. The branching of each category described how each feature and steps were connected. Ultimately, creating the information architecture was helpful for us because it helped us better comprehend what features we wanted to have and how the various devices will interact with one another.
Low fidelity
Paper prototypes
Let's Draw!
In this stage, we developed a low-fidelity prototype to show how the mobile interface will look and how users will interact with it. The paper prototype showed the overall setup process and all of the different pages for the statistics, library, training plan, and settings. This process allowed us to quickly try out different designs and features, without having to use an actual program. Consequently, we got to solidify the interface for the application, but most importantly, we created a prototype that users can test.
user testing
Getting Feedback
In order to see how intuitive and easy to use our design was, we conducted four usability tests. We asked our participants to complete three tasks by clicking through buttons on our paper screens. As they went through the tasks we encouraged them to think aloud to give us an understanding of why they were trying something. After they had completed their tasks, we asked the users to give us feedback about what worked and what didn’t. From our feedback, we found that during the setup process it was redundant to press an answer and then have to press the next button. Most users expected the next screen to appear automatically once their answer had been indicated. Because of this, we removed the next arrow but kept the back arrow in case they wanted to change their answer. We also found that participants had trouble understanding the navigation icons, so we made them more clear to understand, and combined two icons into one to make it easier to navigate our system.
wireframes
Putting it Together
Moving on to wireframes, we incorporated user feedback and brought our paper prototypes to life. This is the stage where we created all of the pages for the mobile application and created a 3D model for the armband. The numbers on each wireframe are associated with annotations that describe the specific features we wanted to include. In areas of confusion, we also made sure to justify our reasonings for why we wanted to include particular features. Creating wireframes not only helped us solidify the design and interactions but also provided us with more materials for testing.
High fidelity
Mockups
Final Touches
Boiling down to our high-fidelity mockups, we tried to implement all of the feedback we received from the previous prototype testing and peer reviews. Because users found the circle graphs to be confusing, we changed the labeling to make them more intuitive and comprehensive. Users also felt the icons on the bottom were too ambiguous, so we went back and changed them into more representable icons. We also changed the Newton scale into a gradient representation for better understanding of wrist pain. The timeline was changed from single hour intervals to two hour intervals to make it easier on the eyes. Additionally, we increased the overall weight and font size because multiple users felt it was difficult to read. For color choices, we decided to go with orange to give off an energetic vibe and a black background because we felt it fit our user group. Finally, we went with a sleek black design for the armband, so users can wear it on a daily basis.
final thoughts
reflection
Looking Back...
We enjoyed going through the process of user-centered design. Initially, we knew nothing about tattoo artists but came to realize there’s more to tattooing than just poking a client. It felt rewarding to know that we were working on a project that could help one of the many difficulties tattoo artists have to live with. Throughout this project, however, we came across a lot of our own difficulties. In particular, our main issue was that we kept prioritizing our own assumptions over user research. Fortunately, the overall design process constantly brought us back to our users and helped us narrow our designs into one concrete, user-centered idea. Although there were many obstacles, it was reassuring and comforting to have help from a wide range of people: groupmates, peers, and tattoo artists.
We were surprised by our ability to adjust plans as needed to finish our project. We challenged ourselves with our design decisions and we were able to follow through until the final deliverable.
In future endeavors, we would like to further investigate how the design can be improved. In testing our paper prototypes, we were unable to get feedback from actual tattoo artists, so if we had more time, it would be very beneficial to hear from our user group. If current engineering allows, we would like to make a working prototype to conduct usability tests with tattoo artists. We also wish to include designs for charging the wearable. In addition, after our presentation, one of the critics made an insightful suggestion that it might be beneficial to add a feature to the application that connect users. This way artists can learn from the experiences of other users and see what possible wrist exercises or products helped them with their wrist health. As a result, tattoo artists can better connect with the community, while simultaneously caring for their wrists.
Overall, this project helped us build our foundations in user-centered design. No matter what profession or project we work on in the future, we hope to always hold the users as the highest priority.