Vybr - Your Personal Wearable Relaxer | Design Thinking Case Study

It all started from a wonderful task given to us by our Professor — Mr. Amit Kundal, ISDI, Mumbai.

The task was to choose three topics we utmost cared about, and research a one-pager material on those topics and bring them to class. 26 students laid out 3 topics each on the soft-board, and by votes, we cut down the 78 topics to just 5. We were divided into 5 groups, and each group got to choose the topic they absolutely cared about from the voted-in topics on the board.

The issue, hence the topic realized by us was Mental Health.

Mental health is something we all possess. When it is good, we have a sense of purpose and direction and feel that we can cope with whatever life (and work) throws at us. But just as our physical health fluctuates, so too our mental health goes through ups and downs.

“Emotional and mental health is important because it’s a vital part of your life and impacts your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Being healthy emotionally can promote productivity and effectiveness in activities like work, school, or caregiving. It plays an important part in the health of your relationships, and allows you to adapt to changes in your life and cope with adversity.”

-Why It’s Important to Care for Your Mental Health

By Dr. Glen Xiong — on Medium

To delve deeper, our aim to be realized was a long way to go. And so, we decided on E-D-I-P-T.

EDIPT Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. Understanding these five stages of Design Thinking will empower anyone to apply the Design Thinking methods in order to solve complex problems that occur around us — in our companies, in our countries, and even on the scale of our planet.

Structured according to the 5 stages of the Design Thinking Framework (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test). In the first part of this article, we’re presenting the case study, following which, in the second part we’re highlighting some of our executions. All in chronological order.

SECONDARY RESEARCH

We commenced our odyssey with Secondary Research by watching bundles of videos, tuning in to bulks of podcasts, studying various blogs, articles, reviews, etc.

Some of the staggering facts realized were:

• The major causes of stress in this country are- work, finance, and health-related issues.
• The World Health Organization estimates that India will suffer economic losses amounting to a massive 1.03 trillion dollars from mental health conditions between 2012 and 2030.
• They are aware of an average of 2.2 symptoms that may indicate potential heart problems compared to the global average of 2.4.
• Indian men (85%) reported higher levels of stress compared to working women (82%). Those in the age-group of 35–49 years — termed the sandwich generation — are the most stressed of the lot, followed by millennials.
• India’s 82% of the population suffers from high-stress levels.

MIND MAP

Since the topic of mental health was very resonating with us, we dumped all our thoughts and feelings into a very detailed mind map. We dug into as many problem areas as we could and created a plethora of topics.

AFFINITY MAP

To gain some clarity and define the problems further, we took out similar topics from our mind map and clustered them into different themes. The main ones that emerged focused on the following topics:

• Psychological problems
• Mental health and Jobs
• Physiological problems
• Impacts and Diseases
• Mental health and the Economy
• Social Media and Mental health
• Society and Mental health
• Women and Mental health

PRIMARY RESEARCH

To dive deeper into the problem areas and identify the main pivots, we came up with multiple themes related to mental stress and broke it down into different narratives. After conducting more rounds of secondary research and understanding which problem area needed to be prioritized, we finally arrived at the topic of “Workplace Stress.” We framed an initial how might we statement to give our primary research a good context:

Face to face and telephonic Interviews were conducted on more than 25 interviewees from diverse industries. After analyzing their behavior and reflecting on their responses, we were able to identify our key problem area.

INTERVIEWS & INSIGHTS

We empathized with our interviewee’s situations and understood their trigger points. We found that most of them had to deal with tension headaches and migraines due to high levels of stress at their workplace. This had a huge impact on their productivity levels too.

PERSONAS

Two distinct personas were formed where one focused on people that worked in corporate industries, whereas the other one focused on people working in creative industries. One of the main commonalities we observed was that both the personas needed better pay, and more “me time”.

EMPATHY MAP

FINAL HOW MIGHT WE

To solve this problem, we arrived at our final how might we:

IDEATION

We went through some brainstorming sessions and jotted down some ideas of our own. We went ahead and did a DVF (Desirability-Viability-Feasibility) Test, to finally narrow down to our top 5 ideas:

• Sensor Hoodie
• Nap Pod
• Release your stress zone
• MenToo Health App
• Rant Mirror

Since our target area was the workplace and the constant emerging theme in most interviews was the lack of rest time, and a lot of stress, we decided to revolve most if not all of our ideas around products that would relieve stress.

SKETCHES AND PROTOTYPING

This was definitely the most enjoyable experience during the entire process. We got our hands dirty (literally) and created a bunch of prototypes.

1. The Nap Pod:

We decided to create a chair, similar to normal office working chairs that could be converted into a nap pod, letting the employee take a quick nap during working hours. A mini clap prototype was made since building an actual chair did not seem feasible at the time. This was to demonstrate the look of the chair. The wire on the top was to indicate a fabric that drapes over the entire chair giving the illusion of an actual pod.

2. Rant Mirror:

The mirror was said to act as a smart mirror, where the employee could go and rant to and on sensing the emotion and words used by the employee, the mirror would either talk back and try and entertain the individually possibly using the universally accepted meme language.

3. MenToo/Workmate App

An app - naming it MenToo- for people to normalize men getting stressed or depressed during work. Another option for the name was workmate- your on the go virtual health mate. The idea behind the app to track the mood, give the employee tasks that would help the mood and report any sort of workplace harassment, and so on.

4. Sensor Hoodie — Version 1

The hoodie idea originated from a sensor helmet that would target our senses to calm the person down by releasing aromas to soothe the atmosphere, music to relax, as well as an inbuilt head massager. We made a detachable portion later on that would only have the massager in the head. To make it more appropriate for the work environment we decided to go with a hoodie.

FINAL IDEA — Vybr, the massaging hoodie

We did a DVF Test again and asked a couple of working individuals which one of these were they most likely to use at their workplace, making sure our project wasn't just a hypothetical project but was also an executable business and 95% of the results for the hoodie came back positive. So we began prototyping again except this time, we made it functional.

We figured out the accurate points that usually help relax and marked it along the hoodie.

Then we had engineers help us out with soldering together vibrating motors and temporarily attaching them to the hoodie.

LEARNINGS

Time constraints taught us to work in a certain amount of time. Working in a team-taught us to hear the feedback and thought process of all to get greater, more valuable insights. Primary research made us realise that what we might think is a problem might actually not be something the user finds a task and the prototyping stage helped us realise how ideas once made visual give our users something tangible to work with and see if they really do require it or not.

What’s Next?

The next step would be to test the prototype (by conducting usability tests) and do as many rounds of iteration as possible. Also to collect multiple feedbacks, to explore use cases, and brainstorm ideas for flexing the features.

Thank you for your time. :)