Knittervention Case Study
The idea for Knittervention came out of my experiences with my knitting friends. We meet, hang out, knit and always end up having to put our projects down risking forgetting where we were we left off.
Knittervention cuts out the question around where you stand on your knitting. With a row counter and the chart for your chosen texture, there will never be a question about where you stopped knitting
Most common ways of tracking knitting patterns:
-Paper notes or graphs
-row counters
-counting your knitting when you pick it up
The biggest issue with these methods are that something tends to go wrong, miss count and your texture pattern doesn’t match.
Meet Sarah:
Sarah is an avid knitter, she meets up with friends to work on projects, is growing her knitting knowledge by trying to work on complex textural patters as well as colour blocking patters. Both of these knitting skills involve row counting to track over all progress but also pattern repeats. She has been using paper graphs and squeezing in little numerical notes on the sides of her graphs to track her rows and repeats, finds it confusing and sometimes totally forgets to either make notes or mistakes new notes for older ones. She also has been known to forget her pattern all together thus negating any work she can do when she meets up for her knitting group. She also wishes that she could have better and quicker access to knitting aberrations and jargon so that she can seamlessly reference the information and get back to her pattern.
She has tried the conventional ways of solving tracking issues but finds that row counters never fit on her needles, and she forgets them if they are lose, she also finds counting rows difficult because its time consuming and easy to miscount the rows
Developing the User Journey
Once I had gathered my research, I started to sketch out my ideas on paper. What would the user flow look like? I knew that I needed to track patters, so giving projects names seemed the most logical. As well as most knitting patterns come with names, and if you were going to track a portion of a paper patter through the app this gave the opportunity to match names and always stay organized. Understanding that then would need a save and resume options, as well as selecting patterns from, and of course tracking rows and graphs, as well as quick access to abbreviations would haev to be in there too.
Uncommon User Journeys and Error States
I wanted to cover smaller journeys that the user might want to take. The primary journey cover setting up a new project as well as returning to an old project. But accessing just the row counter, no graph, no fancy extras seemed just as important too. Maybe a user just wanted something quick to track a pattern they were designing, or had a pattern they knew by heart, say knitting socks, and just wanted to track rows so that when they came to knit the second sock they could keep them matching!
I new that a simple row counter needed to be an option.
There was also the issue around searching and not finding results, addressing this issue was important, because getting a generic error is never helpful, I wanted to give my users the information they needed so if an error occurred it could be quickly dealt with and not encourage user drop off due to not being able to solve a simple problem.
Sketches and Prototyping
Next was all about what that user flow looked like. I tried out a few common app standards, like hamburger menu and top bar navigation, but the users were getting taken out of the flow if they needed quick access to the pattern abbreviations, so a quick iteration meant moving the buttons to the bottom and having as many options available as possible to easy stopping and starting.
Then came issues around sizing and spacing of bigger buttons, making the +1 Row button attractive to push and easy to spot as the user is just reaching over to tap it quickly, but also recognizing that sometimes mistakes happen having an option to remove rows was important if something happened and they had to back track.
Details like clear project imagery came in to question, and choosing images for finished pattern pieces in the archive was very important.Having the user able to clearly see what the patter actually looked like in the final state was important. This ruled out having knitted swatch images in dark colours that obscured pattern textures.
User Testing
I am currently working on the User Testing, I am working on making a prototype for my user group to work with that let them try out basic row counting as well as the same pattern as I want my users to be able to sit and work on a piece of knitting and actually try out ease of use and how effectively they feel they can track their work. I am going to be building my prototype in Axure as I think I can get a much more accurate feel for the product using Axure over InVision. That being said early user testing to test the user flow and button placement was done using InVision.
I am really excited about getting an interactive proto type up and running!
