First up: Idea generation
After spending most of my summer away, it’s been great to be back home and getting into a routine with university life again.
Our first week back to IxD started off with lots of brainstorming and bouncing ideas off of each other. As final year students, our year will revolve around a major project of our choice — so it needs involve something we’re passionate about.
I knew I wanted to create a useful yet beautifully designed product, I just didn’t know what. To help myself think of ideas, I looked at my interests and at things I enjoy doing. After all, we will be working on this for the next 2 semesters so I want to do something that will keep me motivated.
3 main things stood out:
- Food (obviously)
- Helping others
- Gamification/Octalysis
Proposed Major Project Ideas
Below I have outlined my 3 possible product ideas. I have been thinking about what I would like to learn this year and want to make the most out of having the opportunity to try out something new. Please feel free to leave me a comment & let me know what you think!
1. Gamified Recovery App
2. Kid’s Ed Subscription Service/App
3. Social Recipe App
1. Gamified Stroke/Brain Injury Recovery App
In the UK alone there is over 1.2 million stroke survivors, with stroke occurring once every 3 minutes and 27 seconds. 40% of these survivors will go on to have some form Aphasia and require Speech and Language Therapy.
I want to help people get better — faster.
This app would be designed specifically for Stroke and Brain Injury patients to complement their rehabilitation and therapy. When stroke strikes a person can lose their ability to speak, move and eat this can be extremely frustrating but can usually be easily rectified with regular therapy and practice.
A gamified, rewarding experience will track the user’s performance, recovery rate and provide essential data to both the patient and the therapist/doctor.
Therapy works best when it’s carried out as often as possible and good practice usually means faster improvement. This app will help to motivate the user by closely monitoring their progress in a productive and fun way.
In basic terms it would be a speech and language app focused on accessibility particularly for victims of stroke. With an added platform for communication until the user has learnt how to talk again. This may in the future also include general activities to help aid recovery i.e brain games/mini games a bit like PEAK app.
In the long term this could also start to collect valuable data on the side and give therapists and doctors some statistics on what activities may be more effective in the recovery process. Making rehabilitation much more effective on all levels.
I would also hope to build an engaged community around the app which could help to provide support for people in rehabilitation from others who are in the same position.
Pros
- I have experience of what the stroke recovery process is like and what areas could be improved. Gaining some feedback from both patients and therapists should also be easy enough.
- Patients deserve something fun like this to help aid and monitor their recovery.
- There is a market & an opportunity for this app to grow, it could start off as solely aiding speech & language therapy and over time adapt to other therapies.
Cons
- I don’t know very much about speech and language therapy. I would have to do some research to gain a good understanding.
- Would a medical app like this bore me? (Although maybe not as I would like to create a fun gamified app experience)
How might it be built?
For this project I think a native iOS iPad app would work best as I feel this would be the most accessible and practical device for the proposed user’s circumstances. If it were successful I would also consider an Android app so it could also be used on tablets.
Although I may not build the actual app myself due to my lack of knowledge and experience I still want to challenge myself, so I intend to learn how to create useful animations using Adobe After Effects or something similar to create mock-ups.
I will also create detailed prototypes using something like InVision or Principle to convey my ideas.
Who’s it for?
The target audience for this app is:
1. Stroke/Brain Injury survivors with speech difficulties who want to practice outside of therapy sessions and keep themselves motivated.
2. Therapists or doctors who want to monitor their patients progress and set them challenges. Current practice is to provide print outs which are handed over as ‘homework’. This gets boring after 1 time and patients tend to lack enthusiasm and motivation.
What’s the business model?
I imagine that this would be available in 2 versions — free and premium. The idea would be to encourage users to download with the free version (or maybe a trial), which would hopefully compel them to download the paid (premium) version.
*I did think about just providing this app for free but with the average therapy session costing £70/hour I think it would be fair to charge a one off fee for the premium version.
This could also possibly be licensed out to the NHS or private speech/language therapists. Although I think I will have to do a lot more research into this and if there is a demand.
2. Kid’s Educational Subscription Box/Activity App
Keeping kids amused is hard!
I would like to create an app to challenge children to learn new things in a fun and engaging way and possibly encourage them to play outside more.
The app would come alongside a subscription box service and would be a fun educational way for kids to learn about geography, travel and food. It will include collectable items and will have a world map which the child can build over time. The box will also include secret codes and passwords which will unlock new parts of the app — More to explore!
Actually receiving the box in the post would be very exciting for a young child — like a gift once a month! The box would hold game cards, activities and other surprises which would be linked to an app.
They can look over their past adventures in-app and the box will provide some form of surprise & delight every month to keep them interested. They will receive notifications when their box is out on delivery making it an exciting discovery once a month.
Pros
- I love bright/fun illustration and could imagine this in a really cool colourful style i.e I would really enjoy working on it.
- It has a definite business model and people tend to spend money on their children’s education.
Cons
- Some may argue that the box is overkill and that it would work as a standalone app better?
- Start up costs, packaging, postage, and marketing expenses would be high for something like this
How might it be built?
For this project I am again thinking an iOS iPad app would work best as most young kids don’t have a phone yet.
I also intend to learn how to create fun animations using Adobe After Effects or something similar to show off the idea. Something else I would have to think about is the design of the box and it’s contents. For this I would need to learn more about designing for print.
Who’s it for?
The target market for this product would be mainly for parents who want to keep their kids amused through education in a fun and enjoyable way.
It will be aimed at kids aged between 5–8 and marketed directly to their parents.
What’s the business model?
This idea has a steady and predictable revenue stream due to the subscription. The user would download the app onto an iPad and order the box through it or the website. They would then be able to choose a 6 or 12 month plan.
Example: If a box costs £5 to produce, £2 to post and retails at £20 per box you make a profit of £13/box. With every customer signing up to the 12 month plan you would make £156. So if you were to get just 1000 people signed up to the 12 month plan in a year you could make £156,000.
*I would definitely need to do a lot of research into how much parents would be willing to pay for a service like this.
3. Social Gamified Recipe App
People want to cook healthy food but either don’t have the knowledge or don’t have the time to do so. With this idea people can go on and share recipes along with photos, rate other people’s food and gain points/rewards for participating in weekly challenges.
Especially designed to target students and young professionals, this iOS app will revolutionise the way people share recipes and feel about healthy food.
The app will be gamified which will help to retain users and motivate them to keep coming back to use the app. There will be rewards for uploading reviews of recipes, pictures of the food they have made and rating other users profiles.
Pros
- I love to cook myself, so I would find this interesting to work on.
- Clean eating has been a massive trend in 2017
- I have experience in the hospitality industry and finding people who are interested in cooking for feedback should be straightforward
Cons
- There is already plenty of recipe apps out there, so it may be hard to differentiate this idea. (Gamified experience though?)
- It would be hard to build up a user base to make this app work effectively
How might it be built?
I think this project would be best suited to an iOS native mobile application. I’ve never built an app before so this would be a real challenge.
If all went wrong I would again make some really nice animated prototypes to get my ideas across.
Who’s it for?
The target market for this product would be millennials. This group of people love to share things with each other and social power gives them a sense of achievement.
What’s the business model?
This app will be free to download and will have a ‘premium’ version which you can buy for a small fee.
The premium version will offer unlimited use of recipes and allow the user to make as many ratings as they want. (And therefore gain more points etc). They will then be in with more of a chance of being on the main leaderboard and others will be more likely to see and use their recipes.
*This helps to add a competitive edge to the app and will hopefully motivate other users to pay for the upgrade as well.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback at all I’d love to hear it and it would really help me for final year! Just leave a comment below or tweet me :)
