From Design to Prototype
Inspiration/Research For “Happy Hobby”
I’m currently studying Interaction Design through Coursera. We were tasked with conceptualizing & designing our own app for our final capstone project. It was a huge learning curve for me, and a really awesome experience overall. I decided to take inspiration from my own life. I’m a very creative person, but I sometimes lack discipline to consistently put time towards my hobbies.
I was inspired by the quote, “there is time for everything” by Thomas A. Edison. I like to think we all have the power to work with the time we have to pursue a lifelong interest or hobby, while simultaneously trying to make a living. People don’t often realize what they could be giving up in their day in order to make that happen. People have hobbies they’d like to pursue, and feel like they don’t have time to do it — but there is.
Research has shown happiness is a mixture of pleasure & purpose. There’s also research that explores people’s happiest moments — and that’s when we are being creative. This could be as simple as making a meal or as challenging as writing a novel. I wanted to look at time more creatively, and think about how I could motivate others to carve out time to make room for their “happy moments.”
View prototype here (please note there are limitations, and this is still very much in its early stages): https://invis.io/BN9BCUZUE
Core Concepts
Highlighting Time In A Positive Way
My overall goal was to keep the app simple, thoughtful & functional. I wanted to combine mood analysis & time management within a calendar interface. We tend to think of scheduling apps as obligations, seeing blocks of time greyed/colored out, symbolizing time that is perhaps, taken away from us. It was important for me to emphasize free time a user has.
During testing, some users noted the blue highlighted time block, once a hobby was assigned. It implied to the user, “this is your time to do a hobby & have time for yourself,” which is exactly how I hoped a user would feel. Another user insight was that this helps you organize things you WANT to do, which is perhaps, different from a conventional calendar that constantly reminds us how busy we are.
Tuning Users Into Their Emotions
I wanted users to be motivated to log how they feel in a day as a first interaction, so I’ve prompted them to do so on the home page. Some users were missing the “How Do You Feel Today?” message at the bottom of the screen, not selecting at all. So I ran an A/B test by changing the look of the CTA.
Interestingly, users who saw prototype B were first to notice the “How Are You Feeling Today,” message on the bottom of the screen, which I altered to appear more button-like.
I took inspiration from Facebook’s new reactions feature, and had the emotions pop-up directly above the CTA, eliminating the user path to navigate to another page. Overall, I sensed delight from users when they discovered this. During testing, their tone of voice heightened, and most people thought it was a fun feature.
In addition to having users enter their daily emotions, I wanted them to have the ability to look back monthly to see how they felt after committing time to hobbies. My hope would be to motivate them to continue these habits.
Potential Changes for Next Iteration
If I had more time, I would like to explore deeper insights from users beyond the simple functionality I came up with. It would be awesome to combine a mixture physical & mental health analytics. From there, I could explore possible actions for activities, capitalize on moods when we feel most energized, and develop interactions based on that. With proper notifications, the right messaging could be sent at key moments to help motivate users to make the most of their time.
In terms of hobby creation, I would like to delve deeper into what makes people connected to their goals. Research has shown that we only commit to things that are 100% aligned with our values. So maybe in the onboarding flow, I could create thought provoking questions or activities that help users decide which hobbies are most important to them, and why they will succeed at it.
