RelaxApp, an HCI project coming to life
--
People need to relax! And Mexico City, and all the largest cities on earth, usually people aren’t relaxed. Myself included. Driving in rush hour is frustrating, my work was sometimes very demanding and this made me skip meals, and focus at times on work for hours, no breaks included.
I noticed I was not the only one living like this, everyone around me was going through more or less the same, a couple of them even worse: One of my best friends has to work 12 hours a day, with no vacation days, and he had so much stress around him, he ended up in the hospital, with a partial facial paralysis.
I then went on to search for alternatives that aided people with their daily routines and somehow helped them. I found lots of apps, but no application that was really helpful or intelligent enough so that it reminded people that they had to eat, or even that it could somehow connect to a Polar watch and check heart rate variables when not exercising and other variables like sleep and eating habits and then determining an accurate rating for stress and overall energy.
That is exactly how the first idea of creating an App that guided people through their busy lives was born: RelaxApp.
The first ideas came up from my boss: a workaholic from 9 to 11, Monday to Sunday. He drinks a lot of coffee, skips some meals each week and overall is very busy and very stressed. He is very efficient at what he does but he doesn’t strike me as a happy person:
Now, it was all about analyzing all the apps I found earlier on to understand the good | bad stuff on each; and that’s how the first ideas for the structure came up.
The basic idea was about creating a simple dashboard that displays energy and stress levels to the user, shows some graphics regarding performance and sends reminders when the levels are not normal. Users could be reminded to eat, walk or nap when energy/stress levels were respectively low and/or high.
The evolution of the prototype from there was amazing given that I’m not a designer. It really came to life, after live and A|B tests, user feedback and new ideas that came on the way I can really say it is very polished now.
The prototype underwent a notable evolution, from just some papers to a complete design:
I am very satisfied with the end result, all the people that tested it out had positive feedback regarding its potential, backing everything up with scientific analysis (which is the next phase that’s coming to life in the following months).
You can find the complete App in InvisionApp, following this link: