How to create an awesome project for a capstone
Hey, do you want to know what I was so busy with that haven’t written a line for such a long period? Here’s this little thing — a capstone project for HCI course of University of California San Diego.
So, what was it about?
I had to create an application that could help people change their lives dramatically . I thought about building habits at once. Thus, ladies and gentlemen, enjoy the process.
First step is always a paradise for an extravert — need finding. Here I interviewed three people from my target audience.
My observations focused on design brief “Change” with a slight merge into “Time” as there can be no positive change if there is not enough time for it. I wanted to centre around overcoming bad habits and building up the good ones, and also had a glance on what kind of resolutions people make. I have compiled a questionnaire of 25 questions.
Here are my findings:
Andrew is an architect. He explains that recently he had picked up a habit of going to bed late. Before that he was going to bed and waking up earlier, and he was jogging in the morning as well. He said that this habit has appeared not so long ago as now he has to do twice as much. He sits long hours and he’s aware of that. He feels pity of the hours spent on sleep. Andrew explained that h like taking control of his future steps thus he is making plans every three months. He writes his goals down and creates mind maps. Also he uses his phone to create to-do lists. He also mentioned that to reach the goal, pick up a good habit or get rid off a bad one you must have inner motivation, also it would be great if someone lectures you if you’re not that good or if there are some notifications about your next activities. Thereafter, he said he has reached 5 global goals over the last year, as deplaned their fulfillment and worked on them harder.
Oleg is a designer. He has lots of habits and is quite aware of their pros and cons. He suffers lack of time. He has bad habits of being ironic, cluttering and procrastination. Due to perfectionism he misses deadlines. He also wants to wake up earlier as he understands that usually he spends long evening hours on nothing (i.e. surfing the net) while he could sleep and be more energetic next day. He doesn’t compile plans. Instead he is a fan of motivation and workshop videos. He says that two key factors in establishing a habit are taking small steps and having strong motivation. If there was a system to help it would be a smart home that would help go to bed at consistent times switching everything off at the set time and waking you up at an appropriate sleep cycle. There are also outer factors that disturb and interfere with acquiring good habits. He states that the main thing is to take control of your own character.
Ivanka is an HR-manager. Most of the habits she wants to get rid off are connected to interpersonal communication. She suffers lack of energy as she cannot say “no” or wants to do everything perfect thus wants to do it all by herself. Her strongest motivation is self-development and career growth. Her perfect way to create a new good habit is to analyze your life with/without this habit and what way it can improve with it (and vice versa with the habit you want to get rid off). Then you’ll need to plan its gradual acquisition. Results and incentives seem to motivate her better and become a great source of enthusiasm and energy. As for the system for habit acquisition Ivanka is not sure if she wants it but confesses that notifications, incentives and some prognosis on future steps would be quite useful.
What was next? Ideation, assumptions, creating point of view, and some high-level benchmarking just to prove that such an app can bring value and can interest the market.
The story behind it?
Imagine that you decided that you’d go to bed earlier from today but due to late meeting at work, amount of stress and some house chores you find yourself still up at 2 a.m. while you will need to wake up at 6 tomorrow. The result is clear — today has soaked the last drops of your energy up, you’re not satisfied with yourself and the way you control your life while the other goals of self-improvement go down the drain. And no 4-hour sleep you’re going to have or a healthy dinner you’ve cooked can fix it. It’s incredibly important that the enthusiasm of the moment when you set up a new goal stays with you to at least half way to your goal where motivation, control and closeness of the achievement can already take over. You can’t get too enthusiastic if you have energy only enough to walk to bed.
Research has shown that procrastination and inability to plan and prognose make people feel miserable and having no self-control. Having a system that can help define the most useful goals, break them into smaller ones, take control of their gradual acquisition, showing the cause-effect dashboards, putting charges and giving incentive would help people change their lives in a better way, build up good habit and bring up strong will.
By providing control and healthy amount of motivation such a system can submerge a person into a comfortable atmosphere of confidence, success and care.
Next was the fun part —storytelling and paper prototyping. You don’t care about pixels or how beautiful your star people are — just enjoy telling amazing stories. And your users and stakeholders will follow.
Some pictures.
To get best results you need to be very precise and critical to yourself. Or it will be the users who will run away if you made an awful product.
That is why the next step was Heuristic Evaluation. That is the nerdy stuff — won’t share the pics. But if you’re interested — you’re always welcome, just drop me a line.
On the basis of the Heuristic Evaluation results a lo-fi wireframe was developed and tested.
Everybody needs color.
My app was no exception. So I developed a UI style guide — I chose vibrant colors as Habit Expert is meant to be an application that allows users plan and track their progress, get motivational messages, get 24/7 support from the Account Team to get their goals achieved, their bad habits defeated and new awesome habits built.
See the notification, check yesterday’s and today’s progress, have a look at the overview of all your new habits being built, ask your personal expert for help with a meal plan, check your calendar and enjoy your achievement and even more — plan your future habits.
To polish up the experience I came up with several ideas for A/B testing.
Tests with real users at this point didn’t bring any surprises but were quite helpful. Moreover, it’s always pleasant to hear a positive feedback ☺️
You can try it yourself — https://invis.io/XJJR97C6PS8
And finally — I had to create a video to show the final prototype and share my vision of the product. So here it is.
Hope you liked it, guys ❤️
If you want to share your thoughts on this — don’t hesitate to contact me.
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