Wellness planning app
For week 6+7 we were given the task to create a mobile wellness tracking app to help people live a healthier life. Luckily we had two weeks to complete it. This gave us time to do more research and to work on delivering an amazing high-fi prototype of both an app and a landing page.
Together with Jacqueline Vujica we brainstormed on which part of wellness to focus our app on. But straight to mind came ADHD. I have been diagnosed with ADD for about 5 years, but have had it since I was young. It’s both a burden and a super power. That’s why I wouldn’t name it a disorder, but rather a different mental state that needs more attention in some parts of life.
We want to make an app that will help improve the lives of people with ADD/ADHD. Together with Jacqueline we were ready to take on the challenge.
Duration
9 days
Tools
Figma (+figjam), Useberry, Maze, Google forms, Photoshop
Deliverables
High-fi prototype of mobile app, landing page, presentation deck
New challenges
Landing page design, Accessibility evaluation, Memory test, Desirability test
Research
User research
Before we started with any of our research we first talked about what it means to have ADHD. That basic understanding helped us with setting up a plan and goal to base our research on. For our research we wanted to know what part of living with ADHD they struggled the most. How do they solve these problems and is an app already helping them with it?
We listed some of the main insights. This gave us some pointers on how we want our app to be helpful in these people’s lives.
As you can see above— concentration and hyperactivity are the biggest pain points when dealing with ADHD on a daily basis. They already implemented some solutions to their lives. Like breaking down tasks to smaller steps to make a task less daunting. An app could improve their lives for example if it helped them with organizing tasks.
Interviews
The interviews offered us some complementary insights. We noticed that the people we interviewed had extreme difficulty with concentrating on tasks. They also tend to procrastinate when a task is too big and overwhelming. When a task is boring to them, they either do not do the task or wait until the very last minute to complete it.
“I can’t do one thing, I always feel like doing three things at the same time, causing me to get a full and tired mind.
“I have to-do lists everywhere. Usually I write down my tasks and lose the notes in between the chaos.”
“Due to my short concentration span, I only have focus for a short time.”
We noticed from the research that creating a planning app would make the biggest impact for the lives of people with ADHD.
How might we
We completed the qualitative and quantitative research with three ‘How might we’-questions to take with us throughout the process.
How might we integrate a tracking feature so the user is excited about tracking their task progress?
How might we help the user to visually recognize the task better and quicker, so they won’t lose focus?
How might we create a feature that efficiently breaks up tasks so that it won’t be so overwhelming for the user?
Competitive analysis
Parallel to conducting the user research — we wanted to find out what’s already on the market in the world of app’s to help people with ADHD. It turns out that there aren’t many apps that focus specifically on ADHD. We could only find two. Brili focuses on building and managing daily routines and Inflow offers a more complete package of an educational program with personal coaching, community and many more features.
Feature analysis
For our feature analysis we also wanted to include some research on a variety of apps that are being used by people with ADHD, but are not specifically made for ADHD. Apps for to-do lists or living mindfulness are some examples.
We divided the apps in different categories to create a picture on which features are already available on the market and which solutions they offer. Because we also have to create an app that has a tracking functionality — we researched which apps provided this and in what way they implemented it. We found that tracking the goal progress was the most common.
Market position
Creating a market position map was necessary for us to see how the apps are placed in the market. The values vertical are the tracking functionality and the horizontal value is to see if the app focuses more on organizing or on mindfulness.
With our app we wanted to aim high on tracking to make the user more excited about following their progress. And also lean more towards the organizational side to work on concentration problems when working on daily tasks.
Visual analysis
Collecting visual information on the competitors made us better understand the way these apps communicate to their users. We noticed that they all use a soft color palette and easy readable fonts. They keep their layout clean, with as minimal distractions as possible.
Define
User Persona
We collected some demographics from the user research. Since we focus on a niche market it was hard to get many responses. In the end we did collect enough information to create our user persona based on the research.
75% was between 25–34 years old
63% was male
50% was located in the Netherlands
57% used Android as an operating system
Thomas Klaver is a 29 year old freelance photographer from Amsterdam who has ADHD. He has many varying interests including plantology and writing. He wants to switch to a new career path and chose to get an Art History degree to become a museum curator. Due to past experiences with ADHD, he fears that he will have problems planning and organization. He wants to get more self confidence in this area and wants to see more of the positive side of ADHD.
User journey
We took Thomas on a journey of what would happen if he had a big assignment coming up for his new education in Art History.
Starting at stage 1 where Thomas is excited to start a new chapter in his life by attending a school that teaches Art History. In stage 2 he finds out he has to do a big assignment in which he has to memorize a lot of things. He gets overwhelmed and doesn’t know where to start. It’s getting progressively worse in stage 3 as he procrastinates on doing the assignment and only manages to do the assignment badly atthe last minute. In stage 4 he fails the assignment due to bad organization and procrastination.
Now that it is clear to us that concentration and organization is the biggest challenge for people with ADHD, the next step is creating a problem statement to round up our research and a hypothesis statement to measure our success on.
Problem statement:
We have observed that people with ADHD have a difficult time concentrating on tasks, which leads them to forget the task or fail to complete them
How can we help them stay focused and complete their tasks successfully?
Hypothesis statement:
We believe that creating an app for people with ADHD/ ADD will help them finish the tasks and gain more self confidence . We will know that we are successful if the users use the app consistently.
Jobs to be done
The next step is to make our problem statement into an actionable plan. We ideated on some ideas to include in the app. Via the jobs-to-be-done method, we wanted to see what job we could base our user flow on to then start the process on making the end product.
As you can see the main job is to create a task and complete the task. This is our base on which we can build other features. For example, a way to prioritize the tasks or to set the duration of a task.
Information structure
Organizing the information in a workable structure is the next step. First we set up a simple sitemap to see which pages to include in our design.
For the user flow we focussed on the job to be done, which is setting up a task. This includes the whole process. So the user starts from the goals overview page and sets up a main goal. The user can then break up the goal into smaller tasks. When a task is completed a congratulations screen pops up. From this screen the user can continue to see its completion progress in the statistics page.
Prototype
Low-fi
With the structure mapped out it was time to create low-fi’s to get some ideas on paper. We each made our own and communicated on how we wanted the app to work and navigate.
Mid-fi
Since we had a lot of similarities on how the app should function it was easy to jump into designing the mid-fi prototype. The top mid-fi you see is the first part of the user flow. From creating a new goal to adding a new task. The second one is a user flow from completing a task to checking out the user’s completion progress on the statistics page.
We put the mid-fi up for usability testing and gave the participants four tasks to complete along with a couple of questions.
Task 1: Create a goal
Task 2: Create a task
Task 3: Change the priority of a task
Task 4: Mark a task as completed
Results
The good. The participants seem to understand well how to navigate through the app. Interestingly 89% said that seeing statistics of your task completion progress would make planning more fun.
The bad. Unfortunately there were a couple of drop offs due to some technical difficulties. And also changing the priority on the task page was a bit confusing. A participant also commented that “There was too much information on the first page”.
We took these results by heart and included the changes in our high-fi.
Styleguide
Moodboard
Before jumping into the high-fi, we collected some ideas on how we wanted the app to visually look like. Turns out we had a pretty similar vision which made it very easy to make a combined moodboard.
Style guide
We named our app Vasty. V.A.S.T. is a new acronym for ADHD. It stands for Variable Attention Stimulus Trait. Which is more encouraging than naming it a ‘disorder’. The mascot of the Vasty app is a squirrel. These little rodents are hyperactive, but are really good at planning their supply of nuts for their winter sleep.
Principles
The Vasty app’s principles are Simple, Organized and Soothing. Making people with ADHD comfortable with using the app without feeling overwhelmed or overstimulated. This also reflects in the use of colors and font.
High-fi prototype
The two weeks we got for the project gave us time to work a bit more on designing the high-fi’s. We used a lot of tests and iterations to improve the app. In total we made three versions.
Version 1:
Send out for testing. We did a usability test based on the same user flow as we used in the mid-fi. Overall it went well. The only issue was the task page again, with many miss clicks.
In the same test we set up a 10 second memory test with four questions about the statistics page. We wanted to see if people could easily find and memorize the information on the statistics page. Even though a couple of answers were correct, many participants didn’t memorize a lot because 10 seconds was too short or they were tired after a long day.
Version 2:
We reviewed the design of the app, meanwhile keeping in mind some important principles on accessibility that matter for people with ADHD. We changed some of the backgrounds to make the screen easier to look at. We enlarged the input fields, texts and buttons for creating less changes on miss clicks. Muted some colors and strong lines, like the navigation bar on the goals page. We tested the high-fi again. This time with some open ended questions. The participants were happy with the result, giving us a 8.8 on average.
Version 3:
We kept getting the comment that the app still had too much information. So we decided to meet up with our teacher and ask how we could improve our app. After a great session of new insights, we decided that the ‘add a goal’ and ‘add a task’ page should be a popup rather than a full page. Removing the bottom navigation and images on the same pages. Overall we made the app simpler to navigate and create less steps to achieve the job in the most simple and quickest way possible. We removed some design elements, like the scroll bar on the task page and the shadows of the cards. The plus button to add a goal also didn’t make sense, because you wouldn’t need to add a goal often. So we removed this as well.
We are super happy with the end result. A clean, simple and soothing app that makes planning quick and more fun.
Here you can see the user flow of creating a goal. The user can set up the name of the goal, the due date, some extra information and an image to represent the goal.
The high-fi in action:
Landing page
After completion of the app, the next step was to create a landing page to transfer our mission on to the user. Starting with a quick display of the app with some CTA’s. Leading in a section on how the app works. Continued by a feature section and a couple of reviews by people that have used the app.
Desirability test
We wanted to use a desirability test to know more about how people would describe Vasty as a brand and their attitude towards the landing page.
Clear, meaningful and creative were the three most used words. Exactly what we were hoping for.
Heuristic evaluation
We did a quick heuristic evaluation on our interface and touched three points.
#3 User control and freedom
The user is able to change the priority of a task by simply dragging the card up or down.
#6 Recognition rather than recall
We used the same structure of cards and kept the design very similar for better recognition.
#7 Flexibility and efficiency of use
The user is able to complete or view a task in multiple ways.
Conclusion
We are super happy with the end result and really made use of those two weeks that were given to us. Thank you Jacqueline for being my teammate in this project!
Next Steps
The first step would be to test the app specifically for a longer period with our target group, people with ADHD. And interview them afterwards to collect information on how they experienced the app and if it truly improves their lives on a daily basis. We would also love to do more in depth research on their behavioral patterns with digital devices. To see if we can find some new ideas to make this app even more specialized for people with ADHD.
Key Learnings
For this project we were working with a niche target group. Which made it harder to find candidates for our research. But luckily we worked it out in the end. We also had to do a couple of new things, like making a landing page to market the app. And we tried to perform a memory test. Unfortunately a lot of candidates who took the test were too tired or didn’t understand the assignment well enough to remember the questions afterwards. 10 seconds was also not enough time to memorize the screen. BUT next time will be better!
Thank you for reading :)
