Mars Mag - Extensive User Testing

The Challenge to Solve

To raise awareness, I wanted to reach new audiences. I don’t typically hear the target audience discuss space technology, and I wanted to find out why and try to change it.

Several user interviews revealed three main reasons the target audience is less informed about space technology than they want.

Challenge 3: Space information doesn’t appear in their preferred channels: Instagram, Snapchat, and the Norwegian online newspapers.

The personas

Based on the interviews I created three personas for this project. Surprisingly, most of my interview objects had the same pain points and similar needs and motivations. The big difference lies in how they consume content.

The Storyboards

The storyboards highlight the personas’ most prominent pain points.

Target Audience Research Conclusion

To raise the target audience’s awareness about space program activity, I had to communicate the information in a new way, making it enticing, interesting and engaging to this user group.

Researching Competition

My personas visit Instagram and the Norwegian online newspapers daily. They also use TikTok and Snapchat regularly.

Contextual Inquiries

I conducted contextual inquiries on five online magazines to find out which amount of text is right, what makes users click, and learn more about which photos, colors, and designs recur across the magazines; these I noted as appealing elements and styles for my target group.

Most of the users preferred NRK P3. They found it tidy and consistent with a comfortable amount of text, and they liked the photos.

I had a suspicion my users were influenced by the fact that they were already familiar with this page.

Researching Inspiration

I gathered inspiration for different expressions that I wanted to try for this project:

Typography and images paired with calm colors. More expressive typography, with strong, dramatic color and contrast, and user experiences covering the whole screen, enticing the user to scroll for more content.

Researching Competition and Inspiration Conclusion

I wanted to create a user experience with many images and short, catchy text snippets that would entice the user into clicking the links.

The website copy should be divided into short paragraphs with several headlines. The most essential sentences should be bolded, making the text easy to skim through.

The articles would also contain several images, making the experience more visual, allowing the user to easily imagine what the story looks like, and what it feels like - communicating to the user’s emotions.

Interface design for user testing

To quickly learn which format the target audience preferred when consuming space-related content, I created six prototypes in Adobe XD for contextual inquiries. They were greatly influenced by the inspirational images.

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Surprisingly, my users were not that intrigued by the design based on NRK P3 - the favorite from the last user test (Design 6).

Containing space-related content, this layout wasn’t that appealing - it had too much text, and the design was clean but boring. The users skimmed through it and didn’t click any links.

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The users found the playful layouts with lots of text and images to look at, and the minimalistic look, too messy and random (Designs 1, 4, and 5). These layouts made the content harder to consume.

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Design 3 was the favorite, as it presented only one theme at the time, allowing it to fill the whole screen and avoiding distractions. The users also loved the colors and imagery of Design 2.

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To be completely sure I had understood what appealed to my users, I created two new prototypes. This was also a great way to test headlines and different content ideas for the project.

After this round of contextual inquiries, I felt ready to move on and start working on the final design.

Information Arcitechture

The information architecture was based on user interviews. I tested it during the contextual inquiries and had a new set of users perform a card sort to confirm the architecture.

Design Process

I wanted to create a delicate and enticing website that caught the target audience’s attention and kept them on the site to consume the content and communicate space technology in a way I haven’t seen done before.

Technical Details

This website is built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is designed and built mobile-first and is responsive.

Result

I wanted to know if the finished website reached my target audience, and had one of my most skeptical users test it when uploaded.

During the first interview, she said: "It’s just too complicated and far from my everyday life. I think it’s exciting, but I’m not interested enough to read articles about it".

After visiting the finished website, she said: "Will this website be launched for real? [I answered no] What a pity! I want to read these stories. You know what? You should make a website about the stock market as well, ‘cause that’s another thing I really wanna learn about!"