Wellness Tools: Define, Ideate & Prototype
This is a continuation of this post about creating a wellness tool. Previously I described the empathise phase. Today we are going to dive through the definition stage, ideation and the first paper prototype.
During the research phase I got many insights and it’s time to analyse all the observations and synthesise them in order to define the core problems. I made canvases, mind map and an affinity map to identify the main pain points, challenges, most valuable things for the user and their wishes.
All these tools helped me to come to a problem statement:
People who don’t workout regularly need a way to get motivated to exercise because most of them have difficulties getting used to a fitness routine.
My user persona is Emma. She is 30, working from 9am to 6pm and she has a lack of motivation to exercise.
To create an app for Emma we have to empathise with her a lot:
At this step I already had couple of ideas how could I help Emma to exercise more and keep her motivated. The journey map helped me to define the core stages during Emma’s experience with the tool I’m developing:
At the same time we were performing some ideation exercises to come up with some interesting ideas. One of the exercise was made in group: participants simply sketch a few rough ideas for solving a particular problem on a piece of paper. Each piece of paper is then passed on to someone else, who checks it silently and adds their own ideas to the page. This process is repeated until everyone has had a chance to add to each original piece of paper. This is a result:
These sketches gave me a lot of ideas for the crazy 8s:
Crazy 8s helped me to create the first prototype on paper:
At this point I had several screens in mind and started to think about the possible flows and a site-map. In the next post I’ll describe the process of organizing the information and building the app architecture.
It is important to note that the 5 design thinking stages are not always sequential — they do not have to follow any specific order and they can often occur in parallel and be repeated iteratively.
Thanks for reading and let me know what do you think about the process. Are you implementing some other steps in these phases?
