Refresh
A UX Case Study | Luke Jenkins | UXDI Monarchs
Modern workers are spending more time than ever in the office to meet rising demands put on them. But this is causing heightened stress for workers and even decreasing their productivity. Studies (Lunch Breaks and Short Breaks) show that taking short breaks throughout the day can help combat this problem. The question is — are people actually taking breaks?
Overview
Over the course of two weeks our team — Luke Jenkins, Yukkie Ng, Jessica Hom, Amelia Warren — set out to answer that question. Through research, testing and multiple rounds of design iterations, we landed on a potential solution designed to help professionals wherever they are reduce some of their work stress and hopefully boost productivity while we’re at it.
Partnership
To help us bring our product to life, we felt that WeWork was the perfect partner. Their mission statement — creating a world in which people work to build a life worth living — gets right to the heart of our problem. By partnering with WeWork we can help not only the people who use WeWork’s spaces, but also their employers and WeWork itself by boosting productivity creating a low stress environment to work in.
Additionally, WeWork began actively measuring their impact on people, businesses, neighborhoods and cities across the globe last year with the help of an outside consulting agency in order to help improve their footprint at every level of their company. We can help with this goal by improving the lives of WeWork’s users.
Research
Our team sent out a screener survey to gauge people’s stress levels. We got 27 responses, of which roughly 90% said they were stressed daily. From these responses, we interviewed eight people. During interviewing, a recurring theme emerged — work directly caused people’s stress — but people can’t just stop working, so we pushed on. We found that people relied on various different means of relieving stress including talking to friends, going for a walk, hitting the gym, and stress eating. What worked for one person, didn’t necessarily work for another, and might actually make their problems worse. We found people frequently saying things like:
I prioritize my work over my own wellness.
Work has a big impact on my well-being because I’m there most of the day.
I always feel like I should be working.
Work was definitely an issue for people. And spending all their time at work meant that their wellness fell behind as a priority.
Eventually, we distilled a few key insights from all of our researching:
- People get stressed throughout the work day and all have different ways of dealing with it
- People get more stressed when they’re bombarded with push notifications
- When they’re stressed out, people don’t want to make more decisions
- Given the constraints on their time, people want to that what they’re doing is going to actually be valuable
And from these insights we had our persona.
Journey Map
Problem Statement
Jessie struggles with stress due to her high workload and limited free time. Tied to her desk for most of the day, she needs a way to relieve stress in the office.
How might we help Jessie find time in her busy schedule to prioritize herself and relieve her stress?
Proposed Solution
Refresh will provide Jessie with a mobile app where she can find activities to help her de-stress in the office.
Design
So our problem — and opportunity — was clear. We had to help Jessie find a way to relieve stress at the source of it — work. And we started designing and testing and, of course, redesigning.
Mid-fidelity
After multiple design studios in which our team created several iterations of paper prototypes to hash out how best to incorporate the insights we obtained during research, we landed on a design that we hoped would address all of our users’ needs and pain points. The frames below show how we incorporated those insights and translated them directly to features in our app. Refresh — our app — allows users to set notification preferences, choose from a variety of quick stress relief exercises or receive suggestions for an exercise, and have all the information they need right at their fingertips.
We tested this mock-up to good results — all people completed the tasks given to them with little to no difficulty — and we received helpful feedback for streamlining the user experience.
We incorporated the feedback from testing into our high fidelity prototype for further testing.
High-fidelity
After incorporating the necessary changes from mid-fidelity testing, we set to fleshing our our product. We chose calming pastel colors (below) to help reinforce a stress free experience for users; rearranged components of certain features to be more logical; and revised the exercise detail screen. Then we began testing our revisions.
View the prototype here.
Stress is multi-sensory, so I really like the color scheme. It evokes emotions and feelings that help me relax subconsciously.
The issues that were pointed out during the mid-fidelity testing were remedied and revised for the high fidelity mockups. The biggest issues were the clarity of the “Do Not Disturb” option and the wordiness of instructions for exercises. The changes can be seen below.
Usability Testing Results
Once again, testing confirmed our design. Users had no difficulty completing a typical progression through the app and were all pleased with the intuitive design.
Next Steps
After two rounds of successful testing of our design, with positive feedback at every step, we can continue making tweaks to improve the UI and begin building out our library of exercises to begin testing which exercises users find most useful and help tailor suggestions to our users. Furthermore, we can begin building out features we have yet to include to be tested, such as an option for users to include friends in their use of the app and a community feed which would allow users to create and share their own stress relief exercises to a wide audience both of which came up as feedback during testing and stakeholder sessions.
Reflections
While it may seem like this project flowed smoothly to a finished product, which I am certainly pleased with, the path we took to get there was anything but smooth. Our original idea revolved around getting people out of the office to experience the health benefits of the great outdoors (of which there are many), but this didn’t help our users when they were stressed — it was a solution, but just not the one they needed. After pivoting, we landed on a tracker-style app that would help log and motivate users to take breaks. But again, this wasn’t the best solution, so it was back to the drawing board (literally). Finally, we landed on the idea that I’ve talked about in this article, were able to test it out, and find that it did indeed help meet our users’ needs, much to our relief.
Overall, this project served two purposes for me: as always it was an opportunity to sharpen my skills for all parts of the UX process, but it was also a great reminder that, while a solution may seem nice or unique, it might not be the right one for the users and at the end of the day they are who we are designing for.
