Week 3 Summary: Wellness app design
New week, new opportunities
Introduction to the project
The Wellness Institute (your client) is very excited to explore how they can leverage technology to help people live a healthier life.
The institute defines wellness as an active process through which people become aware of, and make choices toward, a more successful existence.
Where to start?
Well I choose “Loneliness” in general as my topic. At this point I had no clue what’s going to come out of this project. I had a few ideas in mind, but nothing in particular.
But they say “just trust the process” so I did. Luckily after I finished with the research, I had a really good idea about the direction I need to go.
Collecting data
Surveys
I started with setting up a survey with the help of the lean survey canvas which was extremely useful in that case. I could set up my questions really fast and really focused towards my goal.
I’ve put it out to as many websites and social media groups as I could. Overall I managed to collect 42 answers.
Interview
I rephrased most of my survey questions in a “Interview friendlier” way and added some more where I felt the need for it to open up the topic a little bit.
I managed to Interview 2 random people on the street in gerilla style and I interviewed 3 of my friends
Competitor Analyses
Really important and useful method.when you collect a few product who works in the same niche as you plan to work and compare them to each other based on features and different business goals.
Read about the topic
I also managed to gather a lot of useful insights about my subject by reading studies and articles made on the field by professionals. It was super useful.
Affinity Diagram
Simple tool to summarise the gathered data. I wrote my findings on sticky notes in short phrase form and then put all of them on the wall.
Eventually organised them into smaller groups regarding their subject.
And as a final step within the A.D. is to find design opportunities / pain points where I can iterate later on and sign them.
Create the Persona
At that point I had just enough data to create a proper user persona, so I did
All information is based on the interviews/surveys so it represents our imaginary user.
User journey
From here it was easy to show how does Carl feel at which point of the journey. Projecting his feelings with emotions on a chart with some explanation above about the story.
Problem statements
And the final step to make our user persona full, we need to put his problems/ frustrations in a nicely phrased way.
Carl who moved to The Netherlands recently, needs to find new friends and a listening community because he feels lonely
That was the main problem what I’ve kept in mind throughout the rest of the project
MIND MAPPING and the MOSCOW method
Now that we had the frustrations and needs, we could start to brainstorm solutions (of course, they have been written on sticky notes). For 15 minutes I brainstormed as many ideas as possibles. Then I analysed the ideas, put them on the wall and organise them into groups. Here is the final digitised version of the mind map. (digitalised of course)
Staying in the physical world using the MOSCOW method helped me to decide which problem is truly worth our precious time to solve and actually include them into our Mid-fi prototype. We’ve got a piece of paper and separated the “MUST” “SHOULD” “COULD” and “WON’T” ideas from each other. That gave me a really clear vision on what features I’m going to work on the next week.
Start the wireframes!
After some brainstorming on paper I jumped straight into sketch. I have to say that I really underestimated the time what I needed to finish the project.
Still after the presentation I’m not fully satisfied with the end result but I managed to put together a good enough mid-fi version to show off.
There is clearly a lot more to do in order to evolve into High-Fi but a good start and I’m confident I will be able to turn it into a nice looking and well working app design.
Key learnings
These are basic, beginner mistakes what I’ve made, bit still, something to look out for in the future:
Bigger font :Body text 15–18 Headlines 20+ depending on the situation.
More white space is essential for a clean interface. And last but not least, a little bit preparation before start wire-framing in sketch might would save some time through the design process.
Summary
Really tough week overall, it was a real challenge for all of us, but we managed to put together a presentable, well functioning app design which is based on real interviews and data. I’ve learnt a lot about time management and the importance of sleep.
I’m really confident that when I’m going to work on the field, I’m going to be able to deliver what is required.
There is clearly a lot more to learn but I’m happy with the results so far and I’m excited to see what’s coming next and what I’m going to be able to create.
Thanks for reading! Have a great week.
