Gratitude Tracker — A Paper Prototype
In the first episode of “Mastering Prototyping Techniques”, I got my hand dirty with developing a concept for an app that could be used in mobile phone and smart watch. I then created paper prototypes and test it out on real users.
Brainstorming
I started by sitting down and listing out some ideas I was interested in. After some brainstorming, I decided to develop a app to remind people to be grateful. I have always been a big fan with gratitude practice, so I was really excited to get my work started!
After setting down on the gratitude app idea, I started to quickly sketch out the concept, functionalities, and interactions of the app.
Gratitude Tracker — design&basic functionalities
Allow me to introduce “gratitude tracker”! This app aims to train its user to be more mindful to be grateful to things around them. Using the built-in GPS system, the app tracks the location of the users and displays location-specific “blessings”.
What is blessing?
“Blessings” refers to text and images that are related to gratitude. For example, when the user enters a park, the app might display “I am so grateful for the trees around me, because it provides me with oxygen!”
Where does blessings come from?
There are numerous “blessings” saved in the cloud database, but every user would have the option to add their own blessing into the database! There is an “add” button for that.
How to interact with the “blessing” feature?
After reading the displayed “blessings”, the user can click the “thanks” button and earn “blessing point”. The user could then know how grateful they have been by looking at the amount of “blessing point” they have collected from the history function.
When will blessings be displayed?
When the user is not moving, the app would display “don’t forget to smile”, with “smile” being a button. After clicking the “smile” button, the app would then display blessings!
When the user move to a new location, the app would notice and display location-specific blessings, that way the blessings would be more applicable!
How will this app work on smart watch?
The smart watch will mainly serve as the display device. The users will be able to view the blessings and hit “thanks” button on the smart watch. If the users want to add blessings or view history of their gratitude, they would have to go to the mobile app. This is because the screen of smart watch is small and thus it is only suitable (in this case) to display and interact minimally with the users.
Prototype — how did I make this?
In order to verify the concept and functionalities of the app, I used paper to rapidly create a prototype. With the goal of usability testing in mind, I used cardboard to make a shape of the mobile phone and smart watch to make it feel more realistic. For the app, I made a continuous scroll so that the testing could be smooth and not all screen will be immediately displayed to the users.
Usability testing — analysis&feedback
After finishing the prototype, I asked real-world users to test it out in order to observe their interaction with the prototype and elicit feedback for the concept as well as the design of the app. You could watch part of the usability testing in-action here.
How did I conduct the usability test?
I first gave the participant a brief description of my app. Then I provided them with two scenario-based tasks and asked them to complete them. I observed their interaction with the app carefully and asked for their feedback on the concept as well as the design after the test.
Result-what went well?
The concept of gratitude tracking and reminding is very appealing to the participant because it is very positive. The participant particularly enjoyed seeing blessings being displayed under different situations, because the blessings are location-specific and they had never thought of this before. The participant also enjoy seeing buttons such as “smile” or “thanks”, because they thought that was an intuitive way to incorporate a button into the design.
Result-what needed improvement?
Throughout the testing, the participant had given me feedback on the design of the app:
- The “thanks” button could be a little hard to tap because it is a really small screen. Alternatively, it could be a good idea to incorporate micro-interaction into the app. For example, tap twice to “thank”.
- Since this is a daily tracking app, it probably would not be intuitive to have to start the app every morning manually. Alternatively, it could be a good idea to be able to set the automatic “turn on” time of the app.
- People might have different way to express their gratitude. Some people might want to incorporate visual cues such as images together with their blessings. Thus, it is a good idea to allow them to add pictures to their blessings.
- When checking history of the blessings, it is reasonable for users to want to view their past blessings. Therefore, the app should allow the users to view all past blessings while viewing history.
- since this is a positive-oriented app, it might be good to show happy animations on the app. Also, the color used in the app could all be positive-oriented such as yellow.
Conclusion of the test
Overall, I think the concept and design worked well. To my surprise, people all claimed that the concept of this app was very appealing to them. They really enjoyed the idea of discovering blessings on mundane objects. However, there were also a lot of other things I had not considered in terms of design, e.g. micro-interaction. If this idea were to be continued, research would need to be conducted in order to understand how and why people express their gratitude. This way the design of “gratitude tracking” could be more seamless.
Stay tuned for the next episode!
