You have five days to (UX) design. Go!
Ironhack Wellness Project Part 1/2
This week at Ironhack bootcamp Paris, we worked on individual projects. The subject was Wellness, and the client was Inpes (Public Health Institute of France). We were briefed to choose a theme in their scope of activity, and design a digital product. I chose mental health. More specifically: happiness!
I will describe the whole process but first, let me introduce you Charlotte, a girl who I met along the way (or should I say ‘created’?) and worked for, the whole week. That’s right, she’s my primary persona. She is 28 years old and works as a Marketing Specialist since 4 years at the same company. She can be described as an introvert girl, though not very social but has a close group of friends with whom she feels very comfortable. She loves spending time with them. Unfortunately he is not happy with her work at all. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot feel successful at her work, which prevents her to get the promotion she is looking for since 2 years now. She is searching for a new job but she’s not even sure if she’ll be happy there either. You can learn more about her in the blue box below.
All of this sounds sad but actually I might have found a solution for her !
Some insightful background information…
If you work hard, you will be successful and if you are successful you will be happier. People adopted this mentality in every aspect of their lives; study, work, parenting etc. And the problem with this kind of thinking, is that we push ‘happiness’ far far away from us. And each time we are closer to it, we do it again and push it farther away. We change our targets. As a very concrete example, think of a sales person who reaches her sales targets. What does the company do? Of course set new targets! But hopefully there are good news… Researches show that our brains work in the opposite way. If we are able to increase our positivity in the present, our brain functions better and we are more successful, more creative, more energetic… So we have to focus on being happy and positive in the present. But how to do that? By changing our brain patterns. [end life lessons here, resume UX design.]
Competitive Analysis
After my initial hypothesis and analysis of the researches done in this area, I first looked out how the others approached this subject and I did a competitive analysis out of it.
To determine my competitors I checked digital solutions that has a purpose of keeping people happy by making them remembering about their happy memories. Either a mood tracking app, a journal or even Facebook memories was in my scope. I analyzed them for several points and finally made a positioning map for 3 key points; visuals, ratings and percentage of free usage.
Survey & Interviews
After the market analysis and UX Strategy, I started my user research. This part was key on the way of defining my persona.
40 people responded to my survey over a night and then I interviewed 6 people. The results of both surveys and interviews were pretty much aligned. To give you some important insights; 66% of survey respondents were unhappy at work, 80% were willing to share their feelings with their close friends/family. They felt happy when they were productive, when they went out with friends and also when they remembered good memories from the past. Both from survey and interviews, the majority were experiencing ups and downs in their moods, without no obvious reason.
Sounds familiar? Yes, that’s quite Charlotte!
Next steps…
Moving forward from this point, I did a few back and forth with the UX Design tools that I used.
I first put all of my user research findings on an Affinity Map. It was composed of 2 super headers. First, Why? — as of why people feel unhappy? , and second, How to Solve? — as of how do they currently cope with this feeling. Then under How, there were 2 main cluster of ideas; Alone, and With People. Then I divided them into 2 categories, Concrete and Abstract. Voilà!
Then there were a few brainstorming sessions which led me to my Mind Map you see below. I had 3 main concepts Picture, Timeline and Game which diverged into little supportive ideas.
It’s not easy to decide at this point because all ideas are your babies and you don’t want to choose one from another. Hopefully I had other creative minds around me; I asked my classmates to vote the ideas. :) So finally, the ideas in blue circles were the ones who got the most votes; timeline, random happy picture reminder.
User Journey
A user journey made really sense to my project as Charlotte had very specific happy/unhappy moments throughout the day. The opportunity moments for me to communicate with her, to put her mood back on, are clearly visible on the graph.
Appy :)
At this point I had more or less the concept of Appy in my mind: It’s an app, where you can create a closed group with your friends or family. Then see timelines of them on a horizontal bar. Throughout the day everyone can upload a picture, an emoji or a text on their timeline. If someone uploads an unhappy emoji, the app recognizes it and it reminds them a happy memory (a picture on the database of the app, either a picture uploaded earlier or a picture imported from other social media accounts). People can load ‘hearts’ to the pictures, and the pics with more hearts (happiest memories) are reminded more often. People also can react to others’ logs; if a friend is sad another one would send him/her an encouraging message. The flowchart below explains these main user flows.
Wireframes and Testing
To be continued…
I will continue my story when we get to the UI part with this project. Until then, stay happy!
