A Sticky Problem: Will-Power, Cheating and Self-Improvement
Stick it: the app that brings the carrot and the stick to life
Project 1 General Assembly (concept app)
Team: individual project
Client: Maria
My role: UX Researcher / UX Designer
Duration: 1 week
Methods: 1-2-1 Interviews, concept mapping, storyboard, user flows, sketching, paper prototype, focus group research/testing, user testing with clickable prototype using Marvel app.
The Brief
First week at GA we were thrown straight in on day two and given our first project. Pair up, get to know your partner (if speed dating’s not your thing don’t do a bootcamp). Get to the route of their life’s problems and design an app that can solve them. Erm…
Meet Maria
To start off I asked the most open questions and let the interview follow a very natural conversational style to get to know each other. Maria, originally from current capital of cool Lisbon where I fortunately spent some time this year, has been living in London for 4 years working as a visual designer. She lives with her boyfriend Hugo in Walthamstow and is an avid sports fan, foodie and loves the outdoors.
As well as seeing the basic skeleton of Maria’s life I wanted to put some flesh on the bones of how she goes about her daily activities, what she does to achieve her goals (big and small, long term and short), why she get’s pleasure out of her interests and where, when and with who she normally addresses them.
I used a concept map approach with a little sketchnote twist to help map out her life and help me identify the themes that leaped out.
Generative User Research
Whilst I learnt that Maria’s Instagram and twitter feeds are usually accompanied by her cornflakes, and that she spends 4x as much time getting ready in the morning than I do, I didn’t identify a specific problem in Maria’s life through the broad introductory chat we had.
With modern technology she doesn’t even feel much of a disconnect from her loved ones back home. She’s not a big communicator. She usually does the cooking for herself and Hugo. She values downtime after work or school. She loves to get inspiration about health and exercise from individuals/independent retailers rather than corporations or publications — maybe there would be an idea in here?
A few ideas started coming out:
- community forum for recipe ideas to increase?
- local healthy living notifications?
- crowdsourced AI created exercise regimes from a selected pool of influencers?
- a name prompting app?
- a community based app to teach you how to take care of your plants?
¡¡¡Problem: where’s the problem?!!!
So we’d gotten carried away. Instead of looking at the problems we’d jumped to making a solution.
Taking a step back it became clear to me that the app had to address her evening leisure time. The rest of her day was jam-packed or structured and her goals couldn’t be accomplished in the fleeting moments left to her on her personal time.
Identifying her evening time as when she was able to devote a little more time on working on her longer term goals I started to drill down into what pain points were causing her the most friction.
Problem Statement
Maria loves informing herself about healthy living but finds trouble putting some of that knowledge into action. She explained to me how much time she spends online finding prescient and independent information and how important a healthy lifestyle is for her, as evidenced by her frequently making her own routines that match up to the science she’s read about that will best achieve her goals.
Whilst she’s great at this it’s the act of actually choosing to get out her Kettlebells rather than settle down to Netflix and a glass of wine. She knows she has the time, knowledge and the equipment but then falls at the final hurdle; self-motivation.
Lack of motivation and discipline is something I can relate to, much like Maria I can’t stick to the 1 workout = 1 pudding/glass of wine/burger rule. I’m too easily tempted and would benefit from a third party regulating my rewards as much as my punishments.
The Solution
Introducing Stick it. An app that will reward you for achieving your goals and punish you for failing, with real live $$$. Each week your chosen sum of money is debited from your account, if you achieve your goals it rewards you with a voucher It also sends you encouragement and progress updates via push notifications and gives you visual feedback of how you’re doing… it can even give you a bit of a social approval incentive via sharing your progress (or lack thereof) with your social media connections.
Storyboarding was really effective for getting the message across for how powerful the solution is and how it doesn’t just drop off when you slip up one week and continues to help incentivise you and tie into your existing patterns of behaviour and wants.
Early testing and design interactions
Once we had the backbone of the solution sketched out I went back to the drawing board to flesh out the user flows contingent upon signing up, setting goals, selecting an amount to debit, choosing a reward and punishment and outcomes screens.
Maria was pleased to see the overall product and thought it would certainly help get her into the habits she puts off at the moment. However, she suggested changing some of the flows in the sign up process to reduce the scare factor of handing over payment details and making the profile page more prominent (a central navigation and information hub for the rest of the app in effect).
She’d also like to see her progress represented in statistics as well as the a visual representation of the money she’s received in vouchers she wants to be able to revisit the information of the restaurants she’s visited.
Oh there’s one more thing, because Maria admitted she might cheat the apps reward/punishment scale it’s important that the app prevents that by having it independently verified that she’s completed her goals, as she has a fitbit we can ask the fitbit to report on her progress to us — unless she asks Hugo to wear it for her this seems to work quite well. In terms of rewards we can direct the vouchers to only be issued for healthy restaurants she likes including sushi joints, korean bbq’s and MaE delis to incentivise her to surpass her goals it’ll issue a burger or cocktail voucher if she exceeds her targets.
Takeaways from early testing:
- Have a dedicated vouchers page that stores previous and upcoming restaurant vouchers along with Maria’s ratings, their contact details, type etc. in order to be able to sort and display the information about places she has been. In addition the star rating may be used to inform the program and give more accurate suggestions for restaurants she likes and that other similar users in the app might too enjoy.
- In order to let her see her progress I added in a couple of progress bars that circle around the profile picture with a tally displayed of number of workouts and calories burnt to date.
- Integrate an IoT device data stream into the app to record progress towards goals — in Maria’s case a fitbit but it could be your gym card logins, your physical data from your smart scales at home or Boditrax at the gym etc.
- Having an informed primary user give feedback about the screens was helpful but for wider user testing I would need to cut out the individual screens or better yet put them into Marvel.
Final screens and prototyping
The aim of paper screen cut outs and the Marvel App clickable prototype testing became clearly distinct. Over the weekend I tested both the paper cut out and gave coloured pens to friends to write what they wanted to change on them. N.B. A word of warning to myself in the future: take your scannable images first in case there are no adjustments to be made and to save yourself drawing the screens twice.
After deciding which of their feedbacks to take on board I rounded out by testing the flow between screens on the clickable prototype— to see whether they could navigate to their desired location and change their settings if they wanted in an intuitive manner. It also helped to see the limitations of the phone and how the user expected to interact — hint the transitions between screens need to by fixed with swipes when going through a step-by-step process and clicks when changing flows. The higher fidelity prototype testing had fewer actionable takeaways at this point without building in more sophisticated graphics and transitions.
Next steps
In future the app might look to generate revenue by partnering with firms to whom the app has obvious synergies: IoT device software and hardware manufacturers; in the rewards section - Deliveroo, Groupon or Timeout so that not only will customers receive money back but potentially a voucher for more money than they subscribe with (£25 voucher on a £20 debit for example), in the punishment section pension providers or friends payments solutions.
That’s a wrap on project 1, if you have any comments please feel free to leave them below.
I encourage you to check the job hunt app Maria designed to improve my life too!
