Last year, in 2022, I collaborated with the Prime Digital Academy to come up with a redesign and rethinking of the web application that we’ve built for people to play the game of BikeTag. It was a fun and inspiring endeavor for everyone, and I just discovered that each of the students has a writeup about their experience. I wanted to come here and share those stories and some of the things I really liked about what these students provided.
As a Primer, ha, to these students starting on this work, I hired an individual on Upwork to create a new design and provide a style guide and set of components that could be used in the code of the app. That proved very helpful as most of the students had a launching pad for their designs without needing to come up with new styles, focusing entirely on usability. The students all had their own individual focuses, but they also shared a common metric for analysis:
- Will the user try to achieve the right outcome? (Mental model)
- Is the correct action visible? (Visibility/Hierarchy)
- Is there a clear connection between the control and the resulting action (Mapping/Consistency)
- Is there sufficient and/or appropriate feedback? (Feedback)
The person that I feel really nailed it was Jamie Tan. The analysis, use cases, and prototype that they provided are fantastic. Jamie did a good job of understanding the BikeTag community and what improvements were really needed to help newcomers understand the game itself.
Jamie Tan – https://www.jamieptan.com/casestudies/biketag
When I saw Rose Weselmann‘s submission I thought it was the best prototype I had ever seen for the BikeTag game. Many of the screens that they provided became the direct models for the UI that was implemented. Rose’s analysis breakdown and brain dumps continue to be helpful in the future evolution of the BikeTag App.
Rose Weselmann – https://roseweselmann.com/biketagio-case-study
There were several elements from Colleen Burke‘s prototype that I really liked but was unable to really incorporate into the app, while other parts did find some small ways in. The focus on user accounts in Colleen’s analysis put a focus on something I had been overlooking before BikeTag 2.0 — people wanted and expected to be able to create a login. I added a login and signup feature because of the feedback from this process, more than I had originally intended to do. This was a good improvement.
Colleen Burke – https://www.collaaa.com/bike-tag
I appreciated the simplicity of Kelsey Vierow‘s analysis and it was so clear to understand that it helped me get more out of the rest of the group’s work. Kelsey really seemed to pull all of the concepts together really well. Kelsey’s next step suggestions are spot on and what I’ve been looking forward to finding time to implement. Especially the badges and streaks features.
Kelsey Vierow – https://www.kelseyvierow.com/bike-tag-redesign
All in all, this was a really worthwhile endeavor and I’m sorry it took so long for me to say anything about it. I had to take a break from working on this project for the year of 2023 and I am hoping to get back into it before 2024. I have reached out to these individuals to see if they are interested in helping design/make updates to designs given how the app has evolved since then. Maybe we will get a chance to collaborate again!
BikeTag.Bike 