case study

A UX Case Study on Shaadi.com

Background

Shaadi.com stands as a prominent and widely recognized online Indian matrimonial platform on a global scale. Since its inception in 1996, the company has maintained its position at the forefront of the matrimony category, boasting a vast user base of over 35 million individuals worldwide. With a core focus on facilitating meaningful connections for marriage, Shaadi.com remains committed to its mission. Through its website and mobile application, the platform continues to play a pivotal role in uniting millions of people in their journey to find their ideal life partners.

"In India, marriage is between two familes rather than individuals."

What is Shaadi?

Before we get into the case study, let's understand what Shaadi is and the culture behind it. Shaadi is a generic term for wedding in the South Asian Culture. In South Asia countries, marriage is between two families rather than individuals. Arrange marriages are a common thing in India and it is a tradition Indians find hard to part with. Even in the 21st Century, around 75 percent young Indians (18-35 years old) prefer to marry the person chosen by their families according to a 2013 IPSOS survey.

Goal

This case study aims to analyze the matrimonial app, Shaadi.com, through the lens of user experience. The primary objective is to uncover potential pain points that users might encounter during their interaction with the app. By conducting comprehensive user research, the intention is to not only pinpoint these challenges but also to understand reasons for the pain points. Furthermore, this study aspires to present viable solutions to address these identified issues.

While Shaadi.com is predominantly recognized for its web presence, this investigation will focus exclusively on its mobile application. The usage with mobile devices has significantly increased over the last decade and most people favor using mobile applications over websites to performtasks or browse.

The current UI...

Usability Testing and Findings

I engaged in a comprehensive research process involving both user testing and thoughtful analysis to gain deeper insights into the app's holistic user experience. This research was conducted with a diverse group, including two parents and three individuals actively using the app. I tested scenarios where participants undertook pivotal actions like profile creation, configuring partner preferences, utilizing the search function, and establishing connections with matched profiles. This methodology offered a multifaceted view of how users engage with the app.

Furthermore, to get a better understanding, I read through reviews within the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. This enabled me to pinpoint user experience challenges they were encountering.

Throughout the research, I found the following issues:

Complex Information Architechure:

The app's information architecture emerged as notably intricate, potentially confusing users and hampering their navigation.

Viewing Profiles is not User Friendly:

A prevailing challenge was the user-unfriendliness tied to viewing profiles. This friction might hinder users from engaging effectively with potential matches.

Difficult to Find and See All Personal Matches:

Finding and knowing all personal matches proved to be a stumbling block, indicating room for enhancement in user-friendly features and intuitive design elements.

Problems and Solutions

Problem 1: Complex Information Architecture

Information Architecture is all about how the information is organized in the app. The app currently has 4 pages (My Shaadi, Matches, Inbox and Chat). Each page consists of a lot of information and some pages even have overlap of features. For example, both Shaadi and Matches display a list of potential match profiles.

There are lot of features Shaadi.com offers. However, these features overlap, as mentioned above, or they are hidden. It takes multiple actions to get to certain key features. For example, Options & Settings is hidden on the bottom of the My Shaadi page. Users have no idea it is there unless they scroll down. The app also provides many different categories which ends up hurting the user experience rather than helping. These categories include - New, Today’s Matches, My Matches, and more.

Why is this a problem?

The information architecture plays an important role on the overall user experience of the mobile application. The reason why many people use apps over desktop websites is to quickly view or perform an action. In the case, Shaadi.com users want to quickly be able to view profiles, new matches, and more importantly be able to chat with matches. It is important that the app provides a simple, easy to use experience for all age groups. When I asked parents to go to settings and update the preferences, they had a hard time finding where the setting and options were. Most are used to seeing the person or gear icon to update settings. Some made it to the My Shaadi page, but when they scrolled, they just saw a list of more profiles and went to the next page. Lots of different categories. Have to scroll left and right to see more. Options & Settings are located near the bottom of the My Shaadi tab. Not visible unless user scrolls down. They didn’t know it was all the way at the bottom. Having profiles on multiple pages is confusing to the user and gives them a hard time determining where to look.

Solution

An effective information architecture whose structure is based on the understanding of users keeps the users happy and more likely to continue using the application. As straightforward as it sounds, the solution here is to redesign the UI to be more simple ensuring categories and subcategories of information are distinct and user friendly. Why complicate it?

There was an overlap and plethora of information in each tab which made it difficult and overwhelming to navigate around. In order to get a better idea on how to organize all the information, I utilize the card short technique . Each card (or in this case post-its) contained essential features of the app. I worked with users and test participants to group cards by similar functions. Ultimately we came to the conclusion of these five categories:

Going into this, I was set on having only four categories. From doing this study, I learned that it would be best to separate suggested and explore screens. The suggested page provides a familiar functionality to most modern dating app's swipe feature that the younger generation is accustomed to. Parents like being able to view multiple profiles at once. Separating the suggested and explore categories provides a simple navigation for both single adults and their parents with just one tap once logged in.

Problem 2: Viewing Profiles is Not User Friendly

The current user interface is misleading when users try to view more pictures, review bio information, and perform actions when viewing a profile. The arrows on the profile picture can indicate to users that it will show the next picture, but instead it shows the next profile. During my user testing, 2/3 users swiped to view the next picture. They were surprised as it redirected to the next profile instead of the next picture. There was no indication that users have the click on the picture to view more pictures.

There is only one action that comes up with viewing someone’s profile. Connect now. Shaadi.com has a great feature where it allows users to shortlist potential matches. This is useful when parents are using the app and want to save the profiles they like. Their son or daughter can go in at a later time and view the potential matches their parents have selected. This feature is hidden under the more options icon.

Why is this a problem?

Users want to view profiles at ease. Having trouble viewing pictures or digging through the page to find key information can frustrate and overwhelm users. This could lead to users deleting the app.

Solution

My goal here was to keep the profile information clear and make it easy for the user to take action. If they need to take an action, for example - Like, Skip, or Shortlist a profile, it needs to accessible and obvious. When I interviewed current users of the app, I learned that the profile pictures and key bio information were the first things that drew their attention when reviewing a profile. I decided to keep the profile picture at the top of the page but also added in a feature where it allows users to swipe right to view more pictures without tapping on the picture. This allows users to see key bio information and view multiple pictures at the same time. And most importantly it relives frustration users had when they accidentally found themselves moving to the next profile. I also moved the action button connect now, along with two new ones - skip and shortlist to the bottom of the page. By doing this, it places the action buttons in natural places where the users thumb or finger is most likely to be.

Wireframe of the solution:

Problem 3: Difficult to Find and View All Personal Matches

Another problem I discovered during self analysis and user testing was that the users had a hard time locating the exact page or tab where all matches can be seen.

The app currently has a section that shows Premium Matches and New Matches on the My Shaadi screen. It also shows “my matches” on the Matches screen, “Accepted” on the Inbox screen, and “my matches” on the Chat screen.

"But which one of these actually show the profiles I got matched with?"

The actual matches seem to be located on the chat page. It is difficult to view all of them because users have to scroll horizontally. All we can see are small icons of each match.

Why is this a problem?

Users should not have to go exploring to find the feature they want to access. During user testing, participants were confused where the matched profiles were located. Quite frankly, I also had a hard time finding the location of matched profiles. Most of them went to the Matches page first, but couldn’t find it there. Eventually after going to each page most were able to find it in the inbox and chat page. Not only was this frustrating to the participants, but also time consuming. This leaves an unpleasant first impression of using the matrimonial app.

Solution

Since there was no clear direction where the matches were, I decided to rename the chat tab/page as “Matches” while keeping the chat icon. This gives familiarity to the young generation who are accustom to using other dating apps and also gives a clear indication to parents where the matches are. On this page, users are able to see all matches in a grid view rather ran just seeing their face icon. One of the issues with chat was that it felt system generated because it would atomically send a default message when one got matched. This can easily be updated to only contain matches that one has started the conversation with.

Conclusion

Shaadi.com is one of the most widely known South Asian matrimonial platforms across the globe. When I first used the shaadi.com mobile app, I felt like there was a serious need for a redesign. It was overwhelming to use and felt outdated compared to some of their competitors. It only lasted two days on my phone before being deleted. I went into this case study with the goal of finding issues and solutions that were beneficial to not only young single adults, but also their parents as they play an important role in finding their son/daughter’s spouse in the South Asian culture. The shaadi.com mobile app currently has a complex information architecture, viewing profiles is not user friendly, and it is hard to locate matched profiles. Solving these usability issues can keep the matrimonial app popular and in the trend with all the new dating apps in the market.

Check out how solutions to these challenges came to life in my Shaadi App Redesign next

mobile redesign

The Redesign of Shaadi.com Mobile App

Background

Shaadi.com is one of the biggest and well known online Indian matrimonial sites across the globe. The company launched in 1996 and still continues to lead the matrimony category with over 35 million people all over the world. Shaadi.com is aimed towards finding someone to marry and currently helps millions of people find matches through their website and the mobile application.

The Challenge

To create a better user experience through the redesign of the Shaadi mobile application while solving issues identified in the case study.

In the Case Study we identified the following problems:

1. Complex information architecture
2. Viewing profiles is not user friendly
3. Difficult to find and see all personal matches

Wireframe

Low Fidelity Wireframe:
I started off the design process by creating a low-fidelity wireframe on paper. The low-fidelity wireframe allowed me to quickly draw up design ideas without overly disrupting the design process. I explored different designs for the same page to determine which design would bring a better overall experience to the user.

High Fidelity Wireframe:
Once I had a good overall design idea, I moved on to creating a high fidelity wireframe by adding more detail to the pages. This gave an idea of how the information architecture is going to be organized and also got a better idea of how the final design elements are going to look like.

The Final Design

During the case study, we identified that one of the main issues with the current design was that the information was everywhere. There was lots of information on one page with overlap of information on multiple pages, action buttons were misleading, and hard to find certain items. To solve this, I started from the ground up and reorganized the information architecture using the card sort method mentioned in the case study. I wanted to provide a simple and clean experience for the user, therefore I grouped similar functions into these five categories - Suggested, Explore, Likes, Matches, and Profile.

User Interface

For the final UI, I decided to keep shaadi.com's brand colors the same as it has become a recognizable matrimony platform for over 20 years. UI is kept minimal by using only three colors.

e-commerce, web, design

Specly E-Commerce Design

In this project, I embarked on a comprehensive exploration of e-commerce design, encompassing the creation of a brand logo, a style guide, an immersive UX prototype, and the strategic implementation of a usability testing plan. It's important to clarify that Specly is not a real compamy , and this initiative was a pivotal component of my journey within the UX Design Certificate program at UC San Diego.

Background

Specly is an online retailer of prescription glasses and sunglasses based in Los Angeles, California. Specly manufactures its glasses in-house instead of paying external manufacturers and passes on the savings to its customers. Specly’s main slogan is “Trendy glasses that make you feel good while leaving money in your pocket.” Specly’s purpose is that prescription eyeglasses should be affordable for everyone. People should not need vision insurance to afford designer-quality eyewear. Eyeglasses not only help you see, but they are also a fashion statement. Most importantly, glasses should be easy and exciting to pick out and order. Specly offers trendy, fashionable eyewear that can go on adventures with you while keeping money in your pocket.

Objective

The objective of this project is to create an online retail website to sell Specly’s products. Since Specly is a completely online retailer, the website will be the primary location for selling the products and for customers to discover the Specly brand. The goal is to optimize the end-to-end shopping experience.

Target Audience

• Millennials (Ages 25 – 34)
• People who may not have great vision benefits.

Design Process

Step 1: Logo Design

• Create a logo that represents the brands values.

Step 2: Style Guide

• Color Palette
• Typography

Step 3: Wireframe

• Initial wireframe of the website.

Step 4: Interface Design

• Visual design for Home, category, product.cart,checkout pages.

Step 5: Initial Prototype

• Interactive prototype with checkout process.

Step 6: Usability Test and Evaluation

• Utilize the DECIDE framework to develop a usability test.
• Evaluation of the website and gather feedback from partcipants.

Color Strategy

When selecting colors, it was important to choose colors that represented what the brand stands for - fun, affordability, and reliability. I decided to go with yellow as the brand’s primary color as it represents adventure, happiness, fun, and affordability. The second color blue represents trustworthiness that Specly's customers can rely on their products. Midnight Gray is a color that complements both yellow and blue and gives the company a modern outlook.

Logo Design

Master Logo

Specly’s master logo contains round shape glasses with Specly written in the Montserrat font.

Logo Variations

Typography

Montserrat and Roboto fonts are two extremely popular fonts that pair well together and provide a modern and aesthetic look. Montserrat is the brand's primary typeface and will be used for the logo text, headers, titles, and short item descriptions. Roboto is the brand's secondary typeface and will be used for long body text, annotations and accents.

Wireframe

For selling eyewear, my primary target will be a web interface with a mobile interface also in consideration. The web interface will allow users to navigate freely and view more products easily. I started off creating a wireframe, which allows us to focus on the grid and flow of content, and not get distracted by imagery and color. It also provides a way to explore different design ideas and present them to the client. Within the Specly website design, I put more emphasis on the checkout process as it is an important feature for an e-commerce website.

Interface Design

Once I had the visual representation of the Ul layout and the information architecture in place from the wireframe, I started to apply the brand colors and imagery to make the design come alive.

Interface Protoype

Can't complete the design without a prototype. The prototype brought the interface design to life with all sorts of interactive goodness. It's like a sneak peek of what Specly's website could be. It allowed us to explore and experiment with ideas as well as check functionality and usability tests.

Flow of Specky's website

View Interactive Prototype

Key Takeaways

This project consisted of creating the branding and an e-commerce store from the ground up for an online retailer of prescription glasses and sunglasses. The user experience was just as important as the user interface for this project. Working on this project, I had to consider multitude of aspects: operational simplicity, strong branding, effective use of visual elements, easily available general and contact information, users’ ability to leave feedback on products, and overall a good end to end shopping experience. A good user experience is crucial to e-commerce website as it helps with user retention which is the direct condition to growing profits. I hope that this design provides a simple and pleasant shopping experience to customers and leads to increase sales for Specly. Final Design

research, usability testing

Specly Usability Test Plan

The purpose of this usability study is to improve the overall user experience of Specly’s website and online store by conducting user experience testing with a sample of potential customers. I used the DECIDE framework for this study as it provides a well-planned evaluation driven by goals that aim to seek answers to questions.

Determining the high-level goals of the evaluation

• Determine if customers are satisfied with the overall user experience of the website from navigating the website to purchasing an item.
• Understand how often customers are viewing a product from the home screen vs. searching for a product in a category.

Exploring the Questions

Once the goals were in placed, I explored the questions that will get us the answers we are looking for. Started off with background questions to get a general idea of the demographics:

• In the past year, how many times have you bought new glasses?
• Within the next 6 months, do you plan on getting new glasses?
• Do you wear prescription glasses?
• Have you ordered glass online before?
• What is your age?

In test questions to learn about the participants’ experience with the website:

• Does this website provide me with all the information I need to make a purchase?
• Rank the convince of the checkout process.
• I found the navigation of the website to be ... (rank from 1 to 5)
• Were you easily able to search find the items you were looking for?
• Does the try on feature help me when making a purchase?
• Do you like seeing the actual project in its natural setting rather than stock images?
• Do you prefer viewing similar styles together or having a combination of all products such as both clear glasses and sunglasses on the same page?

Open ended questions after participants experimented with the website:

• What features do you find most valuable and why?
• What is important to you when ordering new glasses?
• What do you like the most/the least about our website?

Evaluation Approach and Methods

The next step was to come with different evaluation methods to ask our questions. I narrowed it down to these approaches:

• In-Person Testing

  • Have participants complete tasks such as purchasing a pair of glasses.
  • Use Think-Aloud technique to understand the user’s thought process as they are navigating through the site.
  • Monitor first click to make sure users go down the right path.
  • Satisfaction/Feedback survey at the end of the test.

• Remote Testing

  • Have participants explore the website followed by a survey at the end.

• Observation

  • Track how many times participants view products from the home page vs. going to categories.

• Satisfaction Survey

  • Conduct survey after the participant is done exploring the site.

Identify Practical Issues

• Some users may have never ordered glasses online so this may be a completely new experience.
• Survey only participants that have not seen this website before to eliminate biased results.
• Not all participants will be in person.
• Since this is just a prototype, not all pages are fully functioning.
• Hard to do in-person testing for all participants.

Decide How to Deal with The Ethical Issues

• Explain the purpose and goal of the study before starting the test.
• Inform participants how their data and feedback will be collected.
• Have participants sign a consent form.
• Specly Consent Form

Evaluate, analyze, interpret and present the data

The test included 5 participants including 4 in-person tests and 1 remote test.

The in-person test participants were given a task to do while I observed their actions.

4/5 participants went straight to shop men / shop women action items without scrolling down on the home page or visiting any other pages.

Specly Home Page

Although the website is targeted primarily towards Millennials and Gen Z, I collected age to get a general idea if age really matters when it comes to using this website.

Most participants wore prescription glasses and had experience with purchasing prescription glasses online.

I found that most participants were satisfied with the user interface and found it easy to use. However, most participants just shopped for glasses without taking the time to discover other pages like the blog.

Making Improvements

During the usability testing, 4/5 participants clicked on an action button without scrolling down on the home page. The reason for this circumstance could have been that participants did not know the home page had more to it. This was a false-bottom phenomenon where the design fooled the users into believing there is no additional content below the fold.

According to Huge’s research, 91% of the users scrolled on a control image like what we had now, however 100% of the users scrolled when there was a scroll arrow!
Source: http://www.hugeinc.com/ideas/perspective/everybody-scrolls

To solve this issue, I added in an affordance by using a scroll arrow and a little bit of the white from the next section to let users know that there is more content on the page.

One of the top reasons why most customers shop in stores instead of online is because they want to see the item first or try on the item first. As this is an online-only store, it is important to keep this in mind and avoid losing customers because of this.

The Specly website has a virtual try-on for customers to see how the glasses look on them, however 40% of the participants surveyed still found that the product page did not have enough information for them to make a purchase. Many mentioned that knowing the exact size of the glasses was an important deciding factor when making a purchase. To accommodate for this, I added measurements of the glasses in product details while maintaining the minimalist clutter-free design. By adding this, customers will know the exact measurements of the product they are getting which will be helpful especially since Specly’s glasses are only available online.

The evaluation confirmed that users prefer high-quality original images and tend to ignore generic photos as they may seem untrustworthy. In the survey, 80% of the participants stated they liked seeing the item in its original setting over stock images.

According to MDG Advertising, 67% of consumers say that the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing the product. More customers value the quality of a product’s image than value:

• Product-specific information – 63%
• Long description – 54%
• Ratings and reviews – 53%

To improve trust on the website, I plan to add reviews where customers can upload their new glasses and expand the discover page to feed in social media posts from customers using the #specly hashtag.

Conclusion

This study helped improve the usability of Specly’s website by utilizing the DECIDE framework. We were able to confirm that users were satisfied with the overall user experience of the website from navigation to purchasing an item. The evaluation findings gave us reassurance that the call-to-action button, sort, and virtual try-on were being used as designed. In addition, it suggested that improvements can be made to the current online store such as correcting a false-bottom phenomenon, adding more details to the product page, and using more high-quality original images than stock images.

research, persona, mobile, design

Tesla App Redesign

Disclaimer: I hold a deep respect for the UX researchers and designers at Tesla. I did this redesign with the primary purpose of acquiring knowledge and enhancing my understanding of the UX Design process. It is important to note that this research and redesign were conducted in the year 2020. Since that time, there may have been updates to the app's design.

Background

Tesla is taking the charge when it comes to innovation and design in the vehicle industry. They are focus on transitioning the world to sustainable energy by creating electric vehicles that are sporty, quicker, and more fun to drive than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

In each of their vehicles, they have made a bold change that was out of the ordinary for a typical vehicle. When Tesla released the Model 3, they made a bold move by getting rid of the dash controls entirely. Instead, they went with a 15in touch screen in the middle of the dash. Along with that, they also shipped the cars without a typical key fob. Instead, they decided to go with a card with an NFC chip to open/lock and start the car. However, this card would just be the backup key to the key we carry around every day – our smartphones. Tesla’s mobile app serves a key fob and control center for the Model 3.

Goal

In recognizing the pivotal role that the Tesla Mobile App plays in connecting owners directly with their vehicles, especially for models lacking a traditional key fob, I undertook the exciting challenge of reimagining the Tesla App to ensure the best experience for owners. Given the frequent and essential use of the mobile application, the goal was clear: to make it not only user-friendly but also, and perhaps most importantly, as swift and convenient as a physical key fob.

Target Audience

The users of the Tesla mobile application are all Tesla’s owners.According to a survey done by Teslarati, they found that the median age for Tesla owners is about 40-55 years old. However, the users of the app can be anyone that owns or drives a Tesla.

Since many of members of my family and friends own a Tesla, I used them as subjects and got their option on the current Tesla App and features they wish they had. I also read user reviews in the App Store to get a better idea of what current users felt about the app.

Persona

Narrowing down the target audience, I wanted to choose a fictional character, also known as a persona, that fits the characteristics of most of the Tesla owners.

With that in mind, I choose Nick Parker as my primary persona. Nick is a software engineer manager in his early 40s who drives a Tesla Model 3 for his daily commute to work. He enjoys the performance of the vehicle and is happy with the money he is saving by not paying for gas.

Storyboard

Using Nick as our primary character, I created a storyboard to shape the user journey. The storyboard puts us in the user’s environment and helps us find solutions to design issues when the character is going to different actions. I added in the thought process as it helps us understand what the character was always thinking while using the app.

This storyboard visualizes our persona, Nick, on the day of his daughter's tennis match

This made it easy for me to envision myself in Nick’s situation. I was got abetter idea of the pain points he was going through. For example, waiting for the app connect, checking battery level, not being able to send directions to the vehicle, and using the summon feature quite often.

Storyboard

Read user reviews on the App Store to gain insights into how current users perceive the app.

Word Cloud

Used a word cloud to find common words in users reviews for the current Tesla app.

Research Findings

After interviewing Tesla owners, reading reviews in the app store, and using the storyboard as guidelines, I narrow down the most used features and features they wished they had to these:

1. Unlock Vechicle - "I need to unlock the car for friends to get in before I do.”
2. Battery Level - “Will I have to charge my Tesla before I make the trip?
3. Climate Controls - “Being able to adjust and readjust the climate remotely from my phone, including individual seat heaters, defrost, cabin temp, has been great this winter.”
4. Trunk Button - “I would like to see the trunk button on the main screen rather than the frunk as I use the trunk way more often.”
5. Navigation - “It would be nice to send directions straight to the car."

Wireframes

I created a low-fidelity wireframe on paper first to get my ideas out. One of the issues with the current app is that it takes multiple taps to get to popular controls like climate and opening the trunk. I wanted to minimize that, so I got rid of the list menu and drew up a home screen with the most used controls and another home screen with a tab menu at the bottom. I thought that having all the controls on the home screen would be the way to go, but the layout looked cluttered and seem like it would be easy for users to accidently tap on the action buttons. Although it would require multiple taps just like before to get to some of the controls, having a tab menu at the button was more convenient rather then going back and then going to another page. I decided to go with the tab menu layout and create a high-fidelity wireframe focusing more on the details and functionality of the app.

Low-Fidelity Wireframe

High-Fidelity Wireframe

The Redesign

In my redesign, I prioritized the home screen's simplicity by strategically placing key controls and features while replacing the fan button with a trunk button for user convenience. I also introduced color cues for the lock/unlock button, improving visual clarity. The layout was streamlined with a tab menu for efficient navigation, reducing the number of taps required to access features. Additionally, the charging screen became easily accessible via the charge tab, aiming to centralize charging and battery information, displaying nearby charging stations with superchargers highlighted in red. Users could initiate or schedule charging as needed.

The controls screen, also accessible from the tab menu, followed suit with a unified design for control icons, including the lock/unlock button with color indicators. The charge port was integrated into this screen for user convenience. A similar approach was taken with the recent trips screen, offering users insights into their driving efficiency and trip history. Lastly, the profile screen consolidated settings and management items, providing a one-stop destination for Tesla owners to access vehicle information, adjust settings, schedule service, and share vehicle access with other drivers.

Reflection

My passion for technology, innovation, and cars converged in my pursuit of redesigning the Tesla app. Drawing inspiration from my own experiences using the app and driving Tesla vehicles, I embarked on this project not only as a challenge but also as a learning opportunity aligned with my passion. Along the way, I gained insights into Tesla's design choices, appreciating the simplicity of certain features like the three primary control buttons on the home page. While I initially contemplated adding more buttons, I realized the value in keeping it streamlined. I also brainstormed additional features like displaying battery temperature and accessing dashcam footage directly from the app, ideas I plan to incorporate in the future. This project marked a significant learning milestone in my journey as a UX Designer, fueling my enthusiasm for future endeavors in the field.