Goal-Directed Design is a process created by Alan Cooper to aid designers in solving their problems with a process that focuses on user goals. The process is split into six phases: research, modeling, requirements, framework, refinement, and support. During the Research phase, our team completed a literature review, competitive audit, and user interviews, so that we could best understand the scope of our app. We then used our findings to move on to the Modeling phase, where we drew up our personas and their expectations. After this, we moved on to requirements, which we begin to consider what our personas expect from our app. We created a context scenario  for our primary persona and used this to create a list of items we knew the app would need to satisfy their goals. Finally, we moved onto the Framework phase, where we began wireframing by walking through the key path scenario and supplementing this with validation scenarios. From here, were were able to develop our high-fidelity prototype.

At the start of our project, we met to cement the idea and develop a general plan for us to follow moving forward. We chose to brainstorm some ideas for research materials and potential users we could interview. We also spent this time figuring out our problem and vision statement, as well as coming up with a persona hypothesis that we could use when finding interviewees for later in the process.

For this stage of the process, we did preliminary research to find out more about the domain and understand what the competition is offering, so we know how to stand apart. We looked into different freelancing software such as Fiverr and Upwork, and also examined other sites such as Etsy, where users can sell handmade and custom items to shoppers. This was very vital in helping us determine what kinds of questions about other software we would need to formulate for our user interviews, and also how we could begin to understand some requirements for InStore.

Before we could begin to conduct user interviews, we had to come up with a persona hypothesis. A persona hypothesis is an assumption of likely behavioral patterns that researchers make about a user to aid in the process of selecting individuals for user interviews.

We interviewed a total of four potential users, each with a different level of experience with freelancing and different motivations for wanting to learn more. Each interview lasted a little over a half-hour, in which we asked the users questions about their level of experience with freelancing, career plans, hopes for the future, current process for finding clients/customers, and what kinds of services or products they would be prepared to offer. Though we asked each participant from the same pool of questions, we tried to leave these questions as open-ended as possible so that we had the ability to ask relevant questions as they arose.

Cole interviewed our first participant, and Stephanie interviewed each of the other three participants, though the whole team was present for each interview. After each interview we utilized the process of affinity mapping to find distinctive characteristics of each of our interviewees. We found out that each participant had completely different motivations for wanting to learn more about business and largely had different opinions on freelancing and starting their own business. They also had pretty different opinions on what was the most important quality of a freelancing/business management tool, though all of our participants expressed their lack of understanding with the financial aspect of management. This was all information that helped us to create our personas in the modeling phase.