Sterile and Boring   Human and Encouraging ✓

The Deep Dive

This was an 8 month project that included innumerable strategic, UX, and UI choices I can’t convey in a single case study. Below is a select deep(er) dive into one UI facet that focused on integrating "delight" and brand into the product and improved the whole user experience.

If you want to hear more about the full UX process, reach out!

Start with Emotional Research and Understanding

Pocket Prep is an quiz-based education app that helps people study for a professional certification exam, like becoming an EMT, Firefighter, or Nurse.

The exams that Pocket Prep provides study material for are high stakes, expensive barriers to people moving up in their careers. This is important emotional background to grasp the deep-seated anxiety that Pocket Prep's users often feel when they use our app.

Survey feedback and customer interviews illustrated how many of our users log into our app and feel immense anxiety for their exam.

I was purposeful in considering the emotional experience of our users. I wanted to create an interface that felt safe, friendly, and encouraging to align with our goals and values as a company.

Our new pocketprep.com website had just launched. I took the opportunity to inject some brand delight into the web app experience through colors and patterns from the website.

A Dynamic Encouragement Opportunity

The structure of Pocket Prep's apps is worth noting: We offered question bank-driven test prep for over 100 exams, grouped into 8 categories such as Finance, Health, and Fitness. The 2020 mobile apps' UI design reflected those categories through color in its home page banner.

In other words, the app home page banner UI design was driven by internal company categorization rather than user need.

This home page banner was the first thing our users saw upon opening the app, and the most common view in our marketing materials. I saw this as an opportunity to enrich a highly trafficked space in the app to better cater to user needs in function and form.

Inspired by app designs that elevated personalization and friendliness, I proposed a home page banner that shifted in color throughout the day and greeted users with encouragement and humor.

Cross-Team Collaboration to Launch

This feature became a cross-team endeavor: I worked with the development team to determine the logic around time-based UI theme shifts. I collaborated with the marketing team to commission the "greetings" so they aligned with our brand voice. I worked with fellow designers to discuss how this treatment would scale beyond the web app.

"Time of Day greetings" were adopted in my fellow designers' iterations of our mobile app, so the feature became the de-facto cross-platform home page view for web, iOS, and mobile apps.

Upon launch, the "greetings" and in-app encouragements were an immediate talking point for our customers.

Impact

The colors and tone of the home page banner set a warm and encouraging tone for the home page and thus the product. This is the kind of feature that's hard to quantify impact quantitatively, but we have received a lot of positive qualitative data in reviews and user interviews in the years since implementation. There is genuine positive emotional impact on our users to receive encouragement in this small way when they use our product.