Boredom, what does it mean to you?

Frankie Kastenbaum
Nov 3 · 6 min read

Do you find yourself with spurts of random free time? If so, how do you fill those times?

My team and I decided to tackle this situation over the past few weeks. More specifically, we were interested in understanding the pain points associated with these random spurts of free time.

RESEARCH

First, to do this we conducted market research to better understand who our competitors would be and to see if there was available space for us.

We saw the opportunity to provide users with specific content they were looking for while being mindful of the time they spent on a given app. From this matrix, it can be seen that many of our competitors align with the entertainment field and provide content based on trends or algorithms, rather than specific users which was our idea for our app.

While researching competitors we also discussed who we could partner with to strengthen our app. We landed on Flipboard, a website that aggregates content from social media, news feeds, photo sharing sites and other websites and presents it in a magazine format. We chose Flipboard for three reasons:

  1. They would provide a mix of productive and entertaining content
  2. They would provide us with a larger user base as existing Flipboard users could easily important their topics/interests into our product
  3. They have shared values — a shared commitment to mindful mobile browsing using fast-loading pages and non-intrusive ads.

Next, we discussed what platform to create for. We decided as a team that a native IOS app would be our best solution — people always have their phones on them and this would also allow for usage on the go. It would also allow us to leverage the phone’s native hardware features, explicitly, notifications, touch ID, location, access to other apps.

Once we understood where we fit in the market, and what problem and how we were to solve for it, we created a screener survey where we looked for interviewees who spent 2+ hours a day on their phone, did not consider themselves organized and who found themselves with unplanned free time. To do this some of the questions we asked were:

  1. On average, how many hours a day do you spend on your phone? 0–1, 2–4, 5–8, 10+
  2. How often do you find yourself with unplanned free time? Often, sometimes, rarely
  3. How organized do you consider yourself? 1–5

Once we had our users, we were then able to conduct interviews. Overall we interviewed 7 individuals: men and women, ages 21–32, living near major cities across the US & abroad.

From there, we turned to Affinity Mapping to better categorize our data.

Affinity Map

As can be seen from the photo above, we split the quotes, behaviors, likes and dislikes from our interviewees into groups. This was so that we could then write “I” statements and eventually insights based on this information. Some examples of our “I” statements and insights were as follows:

“I like to use apps for productivity as well as entertainment”

  • People tend to use the same apps for different things
  • People look to apps when they find themselves with short sections of free time

“I feel guilty about misusing my time”

  • People often procrastinate when they know they have more spare time
  • Feelings of procrastination are tied to the infiniteness of the activity. When leisure time is scheduled, it does not feel like procrastinating

“I like to take time for myself”

  • People need time for themselves

“I like to learn and discover new things”

  • People like to learn new things and be adventurous

From there, we took this information and created our persona, Richard.

Persona, Richard

Richard as can be seen from the photo above, is a 24-year-old Freelance Web Developer who often finds himself bored during short lulls in his projects. He tends to turn to certain apps to fill this time, but these short breaks end up turning into long periods of wasted time and leave him with a sense of guilt.

Therefore our problem statement was as follows:

In the face of boredom or unplanned time, users who are attached to their phones often get caught up in activities that may pass the time but leave them feeling unfulfilled.

Richard wants to stay engaged and informed in his spare time but struggles to avoid feeling like he’s wasting away his extra time in the day.

How might we help him better utilize his spare time in a way that’s ultimately more productive?

To better understand Richard’s journey, our team also created a journey map.

SOLUTION

To start our solutioning, we turned to a MoScoW map to figure out which features to focus on.

From there, we held a design studio. Here, we focused on the homepage —each of us individually created several quick sketches as a form to inspire one another.

This then led to the creation of our mid-fidelity wireframes. With those, we returned to our users and conducted 4 usability tests. We asked our users to sign up for the app, set their allocated free time, find content to read or watch and add yoga as a personal goal. As can be seen below, users were easily able to sign up for the app and find content to read or watch. However, there were minor problems with the user setting the time and adding yoga as a goal.

2/4 users succeeded in understanding how the clock worked. Several mimicked moving a dial around the clock, however, many were hesitant to interact with the clock.

2/4 users succeeded in understanding that yoga would be contained under exercise, rather than them having to add it as a new category.

From there we turned our mid-fis into hi-fis!

The next step would be to work with a software development team to build out the app and test it further. We also want to then flesh out designs for Android as well as further explore our partnership with Flipboard.

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