UX design | UI design | App design

Samsung Design Jam

Redesigned the tracking screen for UPS with better visual solutions and provided extra functionality to display the transiting information.
Role
‍UI designer
UX designer
Time
2 weeks – Dec 2020
Team
Kaustubha Patil
Sohile Ali
Tool
Adobe XD
Google Form
POP

Overview

Background

Samsung provided an opportunity to consider and explore the design of Home and Lock screens. The existing Home/Lock screens have been a consistent status for decades since the first modern smartphone was launched. By thinking of specific user profiles and scenarios, we create a new user interface for home and lock screens with more customized features to adapt the way people use their phones. This project is an academic project with no budget, time, or limitation.

Identify

We started from explore pain points, situations, problems we’ve had. Then considered different scenarios for brainstorming. Bringing the correct applications and tools to the user when they need them and as quickly as possible. Explore new technologies for their potential in increasing speed and convenience with a user's home and lock screen.

Problem

Overloaded notifications on the lock screen caused frustration
Users can become overwhelmed by too much information and messages on the lock screen and may miss messages entirely. As a result, important information can be missed because users cannot distinguish the types of messages and their preferences, or simply ignore too many notifications.
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Redundant access steps
Users have to go through several steps to access the functions they need. Even with widgets, users still need to take time and cumbersome steps to complete their tasks.

Solutions

Quick Notes
Added a Quick Note Widget on the lock screen for instant, offline, and efficient rapid note keeping. Let the users scribble in notes and share them with anyone easily. The key here was a user needed to enter data first and then deal with security while sharing the information.
Categorized Notification
A separate section on the lock screen for notifications that are separated by category. Users can categorize their notifications by type to keep track more easily and skip over some information they don’t need at that moment. Since there are more functions added on widgets with notifications, we don’t need to show all the notifications too.
Points to note
Users choose the widgets they would like to see on their home screen giving them a feeling of control. Firstly users choose the app widgets that go on their home screen. Ideally, these would be limited to 5 or 6 widgets. The system can tell a user if a widget is underused and provide suggestions for a replacement.
Widget Design
3rd party applications will have to develop widgets for their apps to be on the home screen. A simple way to do it is highlighted alongside. We thought of a simple format they could use to create a widget. Using Instagram as an example we can see how the bottom and top bar menu can form the widget.

Research

We sent out a Google Forms survey to better understand how users currently use their mobile devices and what they thought of their home and lock screens. Our survey, taken by 113 participants, between the ages of 16 and 69, across 8 different nationalities.

After analyzing the survey and responses, it provided us with some key insights that helped frame our direction. 

First, we learned that users want to customize their home screens to access the apps they needed. Second, we understood that since the current array of customization tools such as widgets and shortcuts are being used, we could simply enhance these features. And third, these enhancements to the home and lock screens can lead to a design that better serves users overall. These insights led us to create our 3 design principles.

Design Principles

There are 3 design principles we created from the survey insights to optimize our design.

User Flow

The user flows showed that redundant steps are cut out of the cycle, our designs made 43% faster than using the old home screen to reach a task.

Design

Wireframes

We sketched out what the screen would look like in the initial stage, then used an interaction tool called POP to run some usability tests in order to get feedback from users for iteration of a high fidelity prototype.

Initial ideas of sketches showcased the feature and led to our wireframes.
Low fidelity wireframes after the sketches stage, showed the home, lock, and notification screen.

Prototype

We made the interaction prototypes with Adobe XD, then showed them to some of the participants to run user tests to gather feedback. We had received some positive feedback on the idea and how faster they can finish the task without unlocking the screen.

Takeaway