myGOALS: an Interaction Design Capstone Project
My inspiration for the myGOALS app started at my step-sister’s house. She is the busy mother of four children (ages 1 to 10). As you can imagine, her life is anything but orderly. While she tried to rally the children together after school, I asked her how she keeps track of their progress. Largely, she didn’t. She only had the time to address any issues as they arose from parent-teacher conferences.
We discussed how an app could help. If she could track the promises made between herself and her children, she could offer them appropriate rewards and share in the satisfaction of the goals they met together. This is how I started the creative process for my capstone project: I found a real user need first. After that, I devised a solution.
The solution was a simple application for adding and monitoring goals. Goals could be shared with multiple people or private (only for the creator). Originally, the prototype included a Calendar function. This was removed in later versions to preserve the simplicity of the app.
One feature that makes this app unique is the ability to tag friends and get them involved on different goals. These goals can be one-sided like a challenge between friends, or they can be collaborative like a group project between classmates. Adding a friends page was an easy decision with such capabilities in the app.
With a goals page for the dashboard, a friends page to add the social features, and a profile page to display achievements, I believed the application was ready for user testing with the prototype available at https://marvelapp.com/3cfffbg/screen/52828068.
Buttons and fields were made large for ease of use while still providing enough space between elements to reduce user error. Also included were status messages to inform the user when their actions were accepted or rejected plus instructions on how to recover from error messages.
Common HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) principals like the aforementioned helped begin the design of myGOALS, but the final prototype stemmed from real user testing.
While the groundwork of the application was easily set, users were quick to find tasks that broke down in my original online prototype. In the first iteration, some users would click the space to add a location on their profile to complete the task. However, I had only provided a edit button to change the whole profile section rather than allowing users to select the field itself.
The final iteration of my app was sure to add such capabilities as well as a small revision to the search for friends. Just these small changes were able to increase task completion by 50%. Only through real user testing was I able to identify and rectify the issues my users experience.
myGOALS was designed and created by Lauren Heacker to fulfill the capstone project for Interaction Design Specialization offered by UC San Diego on Coursera. For more information on the course, visit https://www.coursera.org/specializations/interaction-design.
