Ironhack Project 5: Wellness App
Project Overview
For our second to last project in Ironhack, we were given two weeks to create a wellness app and a landing page for it. I was partnered up with Mauricio Carrasco and we decided to create a wellness app for gamers, as this is an area that we are both passionate about. Before we really got into the project, we did some research on the topic at hand to reaffirm our initial thoughts. Our research findings included the benefits of taking breaks, the negatives of too much gaming, and evidence that emotional states affect users’ gameplay.
User Research
From there, we moved forward with our research by creating a survey to collect information about our potential users. From this feedback, we were able to confirm that what we had envisioned is something that others would actually use and deemed as helpful.
Following our survey, we conducted a competitive analysis to gain insight from other apps in the field. While we didn’t find any direct competitors, we found apps that each had certain aspects that we felt we should utilize in our app.
With the idea in mind, now was the time to craft our How Might We statements, which resulted in these three statements:
- How might we create a system that notifies users when to take a break based on the amount of time they spend in front of the screen?
- How might we incentivize users to maintain a healthier balance between gaming and their mental and physical health?
- How might we educate users about the effects of taking breaks when gaming?
The next step in our process was to create our user persona. So, without further ado, I present to you Alec Holder — a 24-year-old software engineer based out of Orlando, Florida who loves to game in his free time. Some of his goals and needs are to maintain a healthy balance between gaming and other activities and to learn when it is a good time to take a break from gaming and coming back feeling refreshed. Some of his pain points are that he doesn’t know when it is a good idea to take a break from gaming and that he dislikes spending a lot of time playing games just to be demoted over a period of time from losing.
Using Alec as our main focus point, we made his user journey to showcase how he currently deals with his gaming antics while we jotted down recommendations for how we may be able to solve some of the issues moving forward.
Following our user journey, we created a user story and a user flow to visually showcase the users’ happy path as they use our app.
The user story is: As a user, I want to monitor my in-game time so that I can be notified when to take a break to stretch/eat/hydrate.
Before getting into any of the mockups, we used the MOSCOW Method to list what our app Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won’t Have. This way, we know what we need to focus on and prioritize moving forward with our project.
Lo-Fi Prototype
Once it was time to start working on our lo-fi prototypes, we decided to create our designs separately at first so that we could go over them together and pick and choose things that we wanted to keep for the mid-fi. This proved to be valuable, as we both had some really great ideas that we would then combine moving forward.
Mid-Fi Prototype
Our mid-fi prototype probably took the most amount of time throughout our entire process because it was at this stage where we started to create our components. The reason for this was that while it was time consuming at the time, it would save even more time later down the line when we got to our high-fi prototype.
Usability Test and Style Guide
Before moving onto our high-fi, we took some time to conduct usability tests that consisted of giving our users a list of scenarios tasks to complete while we encouraged them to think aloud throughout the test. The results we received were admittedly better than I personally expected. Of the five users, we had a 100% success rate for all scenario tasks and an average time of 1:16 min for full task completion.
This told us that we were definitely on the right track since one of our design goals was to create an app that was quick and easy to use, while not demanding of the users’ time as we wanted the focus to be on the balance between their gaming and their breaks.
We also created a Style Guide that we used to stay true to our brand and to make sure everything stayed consistent.
Landing Page
To introduce users to our app, we created a landing page that covers some of the main features of our app, Go Touch Grass (GTG). Now, you may be wondering, “What’s with the name?” Well, typically “go touch grass” is used as a negative connotation in the gaming world, so we decided to flip it and use it as a positive. Additionally, the acronym of GTG can stand for many other things, such as Got to Go and Good to Go.
High-Fi Prototype
Finally, we have our high-fi prototype! You can check it out here as well as a quick prototype for our push notification system here!
In conclusion, here are some final findings as well as next steps:
Findings:
- Users, and gamers in particular, are interested in maintaining a healthier balance between games and health but can use some guidance — hence why we created this app!
- Gamers like to optimize their time, so we designed our app to fulfill this need. We focused on an experience that requires minimal investment (as seen from our usability tests) while providing plentiful data.
- Our initial research findings were crucial to the evolution of our app.
Next Steps:
- Implement a heart rate monitor system.
- Add additional screens to the base of the app to make it fully fleshed out
- Iterate, iterate, iterate!
I loved working on this project and learned a lot throughout the process. As always, I welcome all feedback and critique in the comments, and I look forward to showing you guys the final project of Ironhack.
