Design Thinking — My first solo UX Project at IRONHACK
The first solo project at Ironhacks’ UX/UI Design Bootcamp was a case study for a ‘wellness’ company. The brief was to design a wellness tool in any aspect of ‘wellness’, which could help people live a healthier life and drive them to action. As stress awareness is increasing during the recent years and a since a significant part of the population can be affected by stress — I decided to get into this topic.
I started the process with a Business and Competitive Analysis to know further about the goals of businesses — and to get more insight into the topic stress management. I wanted to know, which tools already exist and which one work for people. As a result of my brief investigation, I had a first understanding and was able to move forward.
User Research. To understand who my user is, to get a feeling of their stress factors, their habits and how they deal with this problem I had an interview with a stress coach as my subject matter expert first and conducted online research regarding this topic. A German Health insurance study showed stress is especially related to people aged between 18–39. This was now my target group in this project.
After interviewing the target group with open questions and conducting an online survey to get quantitative data, I used an Affinity Diagram to cluster my findings to see trends and relationships in the data. The findings are found below.
Insights:
- More than 60% of the surveyed group asked an expert already for help regarding stress.
- More than 60% of the surveyed group used online guides or read about the topic before.
- People have difficulties to isolate their stressors.
- The majority of participants try to prevent stress and try to have a good balance in life.
All my research lead me to my user persona, Lara.
Lara is 31 years old and is working as a Sales Manager. She always has to deal with pressure at work to keep her targets. As she wants to do the best job, she sets herself under pressure as well. She forgets to relax during the day and to keep a good balance between work and freetime. At the end of the week she and her mood is down, but she cannot remember the individual reasons what exactly is making her stress. As she is prone to burn-out she wants to keep a better balance and take more breaks. She consulted a coach already, but she does not have the time to go to appointments.
I made a user journey map to identify her daily pain points, which could be options to help achieving her goals.
Now I was able to define a problem statement…
…” Stressed people need a way to track their mood to get an overview and to get in touch with experts (coach/guides) in an easy way because they don’t want spend too much time to find help and to get in touch with them.”
My proposal after research
Lara would significantly benefit from tracking the trends and changes in her mood — an opportunity to log this to get an insightful overview noticing and responding to such changes in moods (in a diary format) she has the option to find out her stressors. Since she has existing trouble going to appointments, I want to give her an easy and simple way to have online appointments.
After developing the sitemap and the main user flow, I created hand-sketches to plan my layout and the interactions for my App.
After testing, I created the mid-fidelity wireframes for the App ‘in sketch’ and with linking and uploading in ‘InVision; my prototype was born.
The process for the UI part you will find in my next story.
