Rootling: supporting and encouraging your free-time!
Wellness App — Study Case 4
In this article I'll present our fourth project at the Ironhack Bootcamp experience. This time, we’ve been challenged to build a digital mobile app the Daily Health Conference. The goal is to create a design system that reflects an innovative approach to wellness.
We were all involved in all phases of the Design Thinking process using Agile methodology. The project was carried out in 12 days and the outcomes were: an MVP app with an innovative approach to wellness with specific brief and requirements (I'll talk about them in our ideation phase). My teammate in this project is Alice M and we both worked on UX and UI steps, except for the illustrations, which were magnificently created by Alice M.
What challenge did we work on in these two weeks? With our client’s brief in mind, we had the idea of creating an app that could help people feel less anxious and guilty about the productivity pressure that we experience in our society. At first we didn’t know which direction to go, but it got us excited that we would actually find out what to do from research and talking to our potential users.
Research: Getting to know our users
We started our research process with a thematic research and found that:
With these findings in mind, we were able to start brainstorming some ideas and directions to go and we filled in a Lean Survey Canvas to organise our survey questions.
While we're waiting for the survey responses, we worked on a Competitive Analysis to understand what some related apps offer in terms of features. We realised that most existing applications related to time management and/or control of mobile usage focus on the idea of productivity.
Moving forward to our survey that was answered by 67 people, we organised our main findings to convert them in quantitative insights.
With these numbers in mind, we would like to go deeper in understanding the “why” of some answers. So, we interviewed 5 people to know more about their feelings and experiences regarding free-time, productivity and mobile phone usage.
After getting to know our users, we organised the insights on the Empathy Map below, which make it easier to come back to these findings during the whole process.
Pains:
- They fell they are anxious and wasting time.
- They are frustrated about their phone usage and the inability to not use it / disconnect.
- They don’t like to see nagging reminders from apps control usage that discourage them.
- They don’t make their free time actually pleasurable.
Gains:
- They want to feel free from the mobile phone addiction, and to feel in control of their usage.
- They need to understand what they like to do in their free time and start doing this consistently.
- They hope to feel less anxious about how they spend their time.
After taking the users' interviews into account, we have built our Primary Persona: Mindful Mia.
From Mindful Mia's needs and frustrations, we created a Journey Map reflecting Mia's current experience.
The Journey Map is a great moment to think about opportunities in terms of designing the experience. To do so, we organise these opportunities in "How might we" questions. Below I highlight some of the main questions:
- How might we help Mia to reflect on and decide what to do in her free time?
- How might we empower Mia to spend her free time in a more pleasurable way?
- How might we remind her in a gentle way to reduce her unnecessary phone use?
Prioritizing: what's the minimum product?
These questions led us to write our Problem Statement:
Self-reflective millenials need an empowering method to encourage them to use their free time in a fullfiling way, because they currently feel anxious and guilty about wasting a lot of time, especially on their mobile phones.
And then we also wrote our MVP Statement:
The goal of our app, at the bare minimum, is to empower self-reflective millenials to use their free-time in a more fulfilling way.
Users can reflect on and specify what activities they like to do, how said activities make them feel, and then be encouraged to start a relevant activity when they have been using their mobile phones for a designated amount of time. They will be further encouraged by a weekly stats overview.
By providing these features, users will have less moments of feeling overwhelmed in their free time, and also feel more supported in controlling their mobile phone usage.
In the ideation process, by using a Moscow diagram, we also defined the features we're going to work on. The must haves should be divided in our findings features and the features required in the brief for this project:
Testing risks and improving: the users’ point of view
We created a Low-fidelity prototype to quickly test our concept and risks of it. Overall, the users were really excited about the concept of not receiving guilty-inducing messages.
After receiving feedback from users, we did some improvements in terms of UX writing, such as making the buttons text clearer and changing words in the questions to make sure they’re related to our concept. And of course, we also had tips in terms of usability, which we already implemented to the mid-fidelity version.
From the usability testing with the Mid-fidelity version, we’ve made changes to icons, again text buttons, and one more time reinforced our concept by making sure we’re not inducing guilt or productivity pressure. Like you can see below on the tracking progress screen.
After conducting Concept Testings and Usability Testings, we've made some iterations to our User Flow and organised it as below.
Defining Rootling: Attributes and Style
With these changes implemented, we started working on our brand. First step was to define our brand attributes: simple, encouraging, joyful, gentle and natural. And we also created a Moodboard to visually support these attributes.
From this step, we defined our color pallet and visual identity in a Style Tyle. At this point, Alice M designed our logo and animations. We discussed our branding process many times to make sure we're reinforcing our attributes and also focusing in accessibility aspects. So, our colors and typography are not random at all: they were selected from our Moodboard and they were tested in terms of contrast.
We also held an Accessibility Test for visual conditions:
High Fidelity Prototype
And now we’re going to present our app in High Fidelity version! We have two different flows and the first one is when you uses the app for the first time.
You can watch the First Flow (setting up a new activity) on the video below:
And here is the video for the Second Flow (starting an activity):
What's next?
Since designing is always an iterative process, I'm sure that in a 12 days project it's time for baby steps of a product. Then, here are some key points to work on next iterations:
- Validate the MVP with more ‘real’ users, in simulated ‘real’ scenarios.
- Gradually implement current ‘could-have’ features such as the possibility for users to tell the app how they felt after completing an activity, making the silent feature more custom to their preferences.
- Ideation of further features as we go through the Design Thinking process again.
Thanks a lot for reading and glad if you can share your impressions with me! :)
