When The World Is Your Oyster, Where Do You Begin?
Identify a problem. Then solve it.
That was the (slightly paraphrased) challenge posed to us in our fourth project in the General Assembly UX Design Immersive program.
When you’ve been asked to identify ANY problem — particularly in a class full of creatives — the number of ideas that start flowing is through the roof.
Narrowing down to a problem space was a lesson in itself for group facilitation; which, I have gathered, is really the ultimate lesson for this course. Working in groups is HARD.
Now that we have a few projects under our belts and a little more experience, we naturally settled in to our roles (for the most part). We had two strong designers and two strong analyzers/communicators.
What’s difficult about group work in this context though, is that there is a constant push and pull between confronting and practicing our weaknesses versus being efficient with time. Since we are in school, we want to push ourselves to try new things, to make mistakes, and to learn and grow in a forgiving environment. But at the same time, we also want an excellent end product and we don’t want to spend hours agonizing over a problem that someone else in the group could solve in minutes. So balancing time and quality with learning is the real feat.
Which Oyster Did We Pick?
For this project, my team narrowed down to the medical waste management problem space: what do people do with their leftover medications?
There are a number of big, tricky problems to solve within this space, but after following our user research and insight synthesis process, we honed in on our problem statement:
Adults with young children often have leftover medications that they are unsure how to manage.
Eva (our persona) feels anxious about keeping unused medications for long periods of time, but guilty about throwing them in the trash.
How might we help Eva ensure that her unused medications are disposed of safely without sacrificing convenience or the environment?
Our MVP (minimum viable product) solution was essentially a medical waste drop-off location locator. Identify the medication, identify your location, compare these two data elements to a database of medical waste drop-off locations, and then direct the user to the nearest one that fits the criteria.
From our paper and mid-fidelity prototype user testing, it was clear that we were missing one critical element: an emotional connection. Our users didn’t understand WHY they needed to go to a location when convenience is so key.
Therefore, for our high-fidelity prototype iteration, we focused on emotion and simplicity. We did this with:
- Color scheme — mainly mint green, royal blue, and white
- An “onboarding” splash page — as a new visitor to the site, a user would be presented with an informational page. This page contains stencil images that when hovered over, reveal pop-ups containing striking facts to induce emotions from the user that would connect them to the real purpose of the site: dispose of medications in a safe, environmentally friendly, and convenient way.
With the added emotional connection, our users not only knew exactly what the purpose of the website was, they also experienced a desire to do the right thing.
4/4 users had a pleasant and calming experience browsing the website
4/4 users believe lifecycle helped raised awareness in safe medication disposal
3/4 users found the navigation intuitive and self-explanatory
“The website feels so light-hearted. It doesn’t look intimidating like other medication websites.”
OK Google!
As part of this project, we were asked to identify an existing company that would be a potential partner for our solution.
Through our design process, we quickly realized that a partnership between Lifecycle and Google would be a mutually beneficial relationship that would add value to both of our users groups.
Google’s “Your Plan Your Planet Sustainability” initiative — educating users on simple ways to make changes at home to positively impact the environment — aligns very well with lifecycle’s mission to provide a consolidated information source for our users to dispose of medication safely and easily with least effects to the environment and others.
Google’s current focus is only on Food, Water, and Energy, so we have a distinct offering to add to their platform.
Plus, lifecycle would tie in nicely with Google’s friendly aesthetic.
Even more compelling, our responsive web design would integrate well with Google’s new Home Hub product — a smart home controller that can be activated with voice commands.
Just imagine: OK Google — how do I dispose of my medication?
The final piece of the puzzle for this project was we needed to consider the back end. Could a developer actually build this?
For this site to be a reality, we would need to incorporate the Google Maps API directly into our interface to solve our main goal of identifying drop-off locations and how to get there.
Secondly, since our aim is to provide a single, simple source of knowledge, we would need to create a hosted relational database within our website that would aggregate information from a number of different sources and upon which we would query and filter the medication and location data. To effectively do this, we would need to ensure that the data from different sources was parsed and organized correctly so that depending on each medication and each location, the correct API source would be called upon.
Finally, we would incorporate Cookies into our website so that our initial splash screen would only appear the first time a user accesses the site.
In Summary
With the right group dynamic and minds, and, of course, by following the design process, we created a final product to be proud of. But while we are satisfied with the outcome, we could have spent more time individually learning and developing our weaknesses rather than playing to our strengths. Next time, I’ll take a bigger step out of my comfort zone.
