Unplug — My First Week at GA’s UXDI Course

Overview

Week 1 of General Assembly’s UXDI Course finds me swimming in the deep end, sans floaties (and that’s not a bad thing!). I’m enrolled in the course which immerses students such as myself into the fast-track world of UX; 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. My first project involved the rapid development of a mobile app — from discovery research up through two iterations of clickable prototyping.

Challenge

My introductory project centered around a solution for my classmate, Flavio. I designed a solution to help Flavio establish a proper nighttime routine in order to combat his monster phone addiction. Said addiction has way of chomping into Flavio’s precious sleep time. The process was filled with challenges, iterations upon iterations of prototypes, successes, failures, facepalming, and alast oodles of learning.

Process

Three-quarters through Day 1 and I’m an hour into discovery research for my first project. The pace has been set — This course is rapid!

Above: Flavio and Michael deep in discovery conversation

Casting an incredibly wide night, I sought to identify an opportunity to help Flavio. Initiating casual conversation with open-ended questions over coffee, I soon honed in on couple opportunities. But first, I would take my notes and head for the post-its.

I began day 2 by applying the concept mapping approach. It is here (after about 3 renditions) that I identified the root-cause to many of Flavio’s problems: the lack of a proper bedtime routine mixed with a particularly bad case of phone addiction.

Above: Concept Mapping v1, and v2 (post shuffle)

And a problem statement was born: “Flavio cannot stick to a nighttime routine to “unplug” to ensure he gets his preferred 7–8 hours of sleep”.

I began sketching possible solutions. With my app, “Unplug”, Flavio would receive alerts at a designated time each night encouraging him to unplug.

Above: Solution sketch №1

My imagination could easily run wild here — thinking about the tone(s), the “look”, and logistics of how “Unplug” would come to be. But, sticking to a rigid outline (shout out to my instructors Daria and Marianne), the next steps would be storyboarding and creating user flows.

Solution

Above: Storyboarding Flavio’s problem and solution

A few silly drawings later, I had my outcome statement here on day 3: “Flavio uses the “Unplug” alerts to prompt him to prepare for sleep and meets his goal of achieving the sleep he wants”.

For my first user flow, I tabled the alert-receipt-flow, opting for the critical flow of “adding a routine” on which the alerts would be based.

Above: User Flow 1 — “Add a Routine” happy path

Adding a routine for “Unplug” would consist of three main pieces.

1. Adding a wake-up alarm
2. Setting a decompress period*
3. Stating the desired sleep hours

(*That is, the period of time Flavio wants phone-free before actually shutting his eyes).

With my first set of wire-framing (mirroring my user flow), I was ready for some feedback from Flavio. The feedback resulted in the dropping of a screen completely, and swapping two steps (the decompress period for the desired sleep hours).

Revised User Flow

Above: Michael’s wireframes v2

After another revision on day 4, my first set of paper prototypes was ready. Here, I cut out the paper screens and elements and prepared them for user testing. I gave Flavio the task of adding a routine: One that would have him wake up at 7:10 AM, no snoozing, with seven-and-a-half hour sleep cycle, and decompress time of one-and-a-half hours (phew!). Asking him to narrate what was going on in his head as he completed this test, I listened and watched as he attempted the test. I was also testing for terminology (the word “decompress” specifically), and overall ease of navigation.

Above: The first paper prototype

Results

The test yielded plenty of actionable results. First and foremost: make sure screens are complete before testing! That’s right — I missed a button and poor Flavio was marooned on step one of 3 in his task! Testing with Flavio and a few others gave me a laundry list of edits and items to think about for v2 (and beyond):

• Green on/off toggle (actioned for v. ii)
• Overlapping Routines
• Terminology (“Routine”, “Decompress”)
• Narrative/Prompts at each step (actioned for v. ii)
• Progress Bar (actioned for v. ii)
• Decompress Customisation Settings (actioned for v. ii)

On the positive side, my test subjects liked the general idea of Unplug and found a 3-step process suitable and not overbearing.

Conclusion and (Theoretical) Steps Forward

Being the introductory crash-course project it is, this is (officially) where the story ends for my beloved “Unplug” app. But the end of a class project is not match for my tinkering nature.

Day 5 would find me implementing some (but not all) of the feedback I received. I created “Unplug” Paper Prototype #2 AND uploaded to marvel for the next stage (found here). Would I continue the project, my next steps forward would be to test the following among 5 new test subjects:

• Terminology (again, the word “decompress”, and even “routine”)
• Can the user easily identify the purpose of the app?
• What would a user expect in the event of overlapping routines?
• What would a user expect from the decompress alerts?

Week 1 at GA’s UXDI23 Course has been incredibly educational and FUN. Combined with the pre-interview work and the pre-course work, I look forward to additional projects at GA AND in the real-world. Aside from the hard skills, what’s coming more into light is what the heart of UX is — and that is providing good experiences and solutions to users. #MichaelDoesUX2018