No such thing as too much coffee…

Let me tell you a story… When I was an undergrad, I had a job that required me to stay up quite late… like, many nights I was up till 3–4 am and be up by 8 for class; therefore, I basically lived on coffee. Until one day, by body just stopped. I physically couldn’t get out of bed for nearly 24 hours. I realized my life needed to change and I had to find a way to live without depending on caff to keep me human.

Fast forward, I recently had an assignment for a certification I was working on that tasked me with building an app that helped people change how they interacted with time. The result? a prototype for a fairly cool app I’ve called LyfeStyle (don’t ask why, it was a cool production name…) My goal was to create something that helped people match their schedules to their body’s needs, rather than forcing them into an artificial pattern.

It began as an idea, the details formed, a paper prototype was created. My initial design was basically 4 drawers, one showing sleep depth logs, one showing alertness logs, a calendar, and a set of alarms. I decided to use something like a fitbit to get the sleep data, and something like those eye trackers we use in UX studies to see where user’s eyes focus. I don’t know if anything like that exists yet, but hey, it’s just a prototype, right?

I had a cool heuristic evaluation session. I hate heuristics, but I got paired with a couple really cool ladies that were both excellent designers. They gave me some awesome tips, and this thing kept getting bigger and bigger. a photoshop prototype came, and then I used invisionapp.com to build a clickable version. I tested, expanded, tested, expanded, until I was happy with it. I tested with users, I tested with experts. Frankly, if anything, I believe that systematic and thorough testing throughout the development process is essential to building a quality product.

In summary, this was an incredibly enjoyable and useful assignment. I don’t plan on developing a full app, but it was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. Remember, when in doubt, test again ;-)