Talk-Alarm — Coursera Capstone Project
Fighting sleepiness in the morning have been always a problem for many people, me especially is the case. The capstone project offers a nice chance for me, well, if not solving it in the end, at least a chance to find out a bit more about this drowsiness issue that has been bothering me for long time.
Capstone project is a final project from a Interaction Design Specializaion on Coursera, In this case, developing an app prototype following the project guidiences. This is gonna be a personal journal of this very first app prototype that I’ve made.
Week 1&2 The Need-finding.
The very first phase of the capstone is Need-finding. This is an interesting step, went out and interviewed some people about their sleeping habit and alarm usage. Interviewing is not a strange task to me as I worked a year for a consultancy company. It is always interesting to interview people, and the results always surprise you. Like this time, I discovered some people is completely another polar to me, they simply need NO ALARM to wake up, and alarm in a strange way affects their sleep in a manner that the worry of the alarm going-off anytime bothers them while they are sleeping.
Also one of the others interesting finding is one of the interviewer mentioned that how energy spend of the day affects he sleep awake routine. And this leads to later research on the internal body clock or circadian rhythm.
But the finding that can count as inspired the whole app making was discovered at this stage, one of the interviewer thinks it was nice that there is a period of time her boyfriend woke her up through phones everyday, although sadly at the time of the interview they were separated. But the finding at the stage was not profound insight yet as later I went off to different direction. But it is always interesting to distill and extract what all means behind what the interviewers say on the surface.
Week 3 Inspirations.
The inspiration phase is more like Concept and Research stage in my profession. This phase I have to come up with a POV point of view, to anchor a direction that the project is going about, more like a high-level paragraph to confirm what is the problem and how is it the approach to solve it. How to phase the direction is also important, framing e.g. how might we .. user need a way to .. are good ways to generating opportunity/direction.
Here are the two POVs:
1. Waking-up and getting-to-sleep in fact relates to a person’s Circadian Rhythm or the correlated Biological Clock. Rather than a traditional approach that stimulates only one node of the Circadian Rhythm (and perhaps poorly), a approach that helps a user to adjust and accommodate to one’s best Circadian Rhythm could construct an experience with time to the user.
2. With observations, waking up by a work call or a person shakes us up more effectively than a meaningless ring from an alarm. Waking up TO a social interaction seems to work better than just simply wake-up, period. Wake-up to a certain activities/tasks/interaction possibly offers better motivations to fight a drowsy struggling wake-up.
Then comes to inspirations research, look at current solutions or related inspirations, just like making a mood board or idea collage.
Week 4 Story boards and Prototype.
This stage is just fun and at the same time hard work. Generating a story board and a paper prototype to the correspondent scenario. At the time I found paper prototype is time consuming, but the later digital prototype is more the killer.
Design-wise, There were two directions I sprang off with. One attempts to help users adjust their circadian rhythm by simply being a reminder app. Another is an alarm app with friends voice message as ringtone.
But at the stage is easy to make mistake like lack of descriptions or navigational errors. I think a navigation map should be considered and implemented at this stage maybe.
Week 5 Heuristic Evaluation.
This week students on Coursera were asked to do a Heuristic Evaluation on each others prototypes, simply put is to critic on any violation on user experiences. And the students would receive feedbacks then make change on their design. And before this, there was another pilot testing, with face to face app running.
At this stage I realized that the circadian rhythm reminder captures only a smaller group of users, or could say that this approach has to persuade and convince the users about the scientific/biology theory of sleep-awake cycle and recommend users to adjust their daily routines to fit this recommend model of living/lifestyle which is not non-useful, but it demands a way too much change on a user life-style. I think it would be difficult.
Then it was the time I shifted the whole focus to the Social Alarm direction, coupling with improvement from the feedbacks.
Week 6 & 7 Plan and Development.
This two weeks were just simply planning and working on digital prototypes. Well it was experimenting of softwares and platforms as well. There were a lots softwares of web-base app such as: Adobe XD, Axure, InVision, Sketch, etc. Pre-planing like navigational map is important to avoid unessary repeated works, although repeated works are definitely gonna happen.
Week 8 & 9 A-B Testing.
Before A-B testing, there was again a in-person pilot test, went through it, edited the design, proceed. After it, User-testing.com was recommended by the course for the A-B testing. And it was interesting and strangly awkward(maybe it’s just me for the first time=P) to review the video recording of users performing the tasks with the app. The sample here is very small only four testers, but well it’s more about to experiment setting design and a experience of running a test.
After the testing there will be a iteration of the app, and over and over again in professional industry I suppose.
Week 10 Show and Tell.
Here is it, this journal.
Well what a journey span through more than half a year, from all the module courses of the specialisation to the final capstone project. Definitely grew a little bit more and better understand about app development. Meanwhile I finished whole of introductions of front-back end programming languages such as Python PHP Html5 CSS and JavaScript. Maybe later all these knowledge could be weaved together to build some thing? Let see!