MazeFire Design

MazeFire is company focused on educating students through maze games designed using optimal neurological pathways.

What I Did
Generated and executed the entire design plan for the re-designing of the MazeFire website and the maze games, as well as the incorporation of new features.

Analyzed the usability report to create paper prototypes that were constantly shared with the team for feedback.

Designed new features to add based on business needs, as well as feedback from the user testing.

Created interactive prototype based on paper prototype iterations.

Goals
Design an interactive prototype to fix these issues as well as adding new user features following design principles.

What I Learned
Iterative testing, collaborating with a cross-disciplinary team, business needs vs user needs, remote work.

Role
 Lead UX Researcher and Designer
For
 MazeFire
Date
 Jan 2018 – Jun 2018
Type
 Website Interactive Prototype
Methods
 Information Architecture, Wireframing, Axure Prototyping, Object/Action/Attribute Grammar, and Usability Principles
Tools
 Axure RP, Paper Prototyping, Google Docs Collaboration, Trello, Slack, and JIRA

The original home page was visually cluttered, overwhelming, and had a confusing information architecture. The major redesigns were:

1. Creating a cleaner navigation bar.

  1. Directing new users to where they would need to go, rather than leaving them on their own.

The maze page was overloaded with information and a dated interface that reminded users of interfacing with an old computer. The major redesigns were:

1. Updating the design to reflect more modern design patterns.

  1. Adding a filter and search bar along with an improved information architecture to allow users to get to where they need to be more quickly.

The multitude of buttons without clear groupings on the old maze design confused users on where they needed to go, and on what options ment what. The major redesign was:

1. Reorganizing and renaming the buttons to make more sense to the user.

The original help page was blocks of text that no one wanted to read during testing. The major redesign was:

1. Creating a simpler and more visual help option, as well as the ability to go to a more in-depth if more help is needed.

The dashboard had two navigation bars that confused users, and the interface reminded users of a spreadsheet. The major redesigns were:

1. Updating the design to look more modern.

  1. Removing the side navigation bar and reorganizing the top navigation bar to follow a better information architecture.

A home page was designed to account for regular users who no longer need guidance in where to go on the site. Instead:

1. More data visualization was added to show the user’s progress over time on all of their maze games.

  1. A To-Do section was added so users could quickly keep track of any mazes they were assigned (ex: when the next one is due)

A tutorial was added to help users become familiar with how the maze games worked. This was done to:

1. Teach them the system early on, so that when they took the mazes, they would be focused on the questions rather than the interface.

  1. Limit confusion by teaching them site-specific terms before starting the mazes.