A productivity app that integrates wellbeing and mental health awareness.
Best Overall Project – Design @ UCI's Designathon
Overview
Motivator was created during a designathon hosted by Design @ UC Irvine. For 48 hours, my team designed a desktop app that aims to integrate seamlessly with an individuals' daily workflow to help them tackle procrastination. Our app also aims to promote mental wellbeing within our users.
After our initial conversations, my team decided to focus on a solution to help individuals with personal accountability while also promoting mental wellbeing.
Together, we created Motivator, a desktop app that integrates wellbeing and mental health awareness all in one place.
User Research
In the short period of time we had, my team sent out a survey to our peers to understand how individuals currently keep track of their daily tasks and their personal wellbeing.
Our survey was divided into two sections: experience with productivity apps and experience with mental health apps. In total, we were able to get 39 responses.
We found that participants who used productivity apps usually used them on a daily or weekly basis. Participants favored features such as calendars, notifications, task priority, and checklists.
For mental health, we found that 71.8% of our participants never used a mental health app. Participants who did use these apps enjoyed features like journaling, self-care reminders, and goal tracking.
We consolidated our findings into two pain point categories: "Accountability with Tasks" and "Mental Health". Then, we separated the responses we received from our survey into subcategories based on the challenges users faced in their experiences with productivity and mental health apps.
To further compile our survey results, we created two user personas to highlight common pain points we found.
Once our personas were finalized, we then developed a user journey which helped us understand how our product could be used in a scenario.
Ideation
After compiling our survey findings into insights, my team began to develop solutions based on these insights.
My team conducted a brainstorming session where we utilized the key insights from our survey to develop possible solutions in our app.
After developing our solutions, asked ourselves: how will users navigate to these solutions? This led us to develop a user flow that visualizes the various pathways users could use to get to our key features within Motivator.
One feature we wanted to highlight, was the use of widgets. We added widgets as a feature in Motivator to make our experience more personal to users. Highlighting these in our user flow helped us understand which features could serve as widgets within our product.
With the user flow complete, my team moved on to creating our first iteration of wireframes. Due to limited time, each member of the team took on designs for one part of the app. I focused on creating wireframes for the mental health section of Motivator.
One of the challenges we came across was creating our dashboard for our desktop app. Everyone created their own low-fidelity wireframe for the dashboard. Then, we reconvened for mini critique sessions to discuss our wireframes. This process helped us decide on a cohesive dashboard and helped us develop a framework for the rest of our page designs.
Creating Motivator was my second designathon and it was an experience that I won’t forget. During this project, I learned how vital communication is in the design thinking process. For example, my team and I created many iterations of our app’s design. While we all understood what features we wanted, the way we visualized each feature was different. Being able to show how we visualized these features, and discussing our thought processes, was vital to our outcome.
Additionally, I learned how important it is to pick your battles when it comes to designing a product. During our ideation period, we came up with a variety of ideas to solve the problems we found in our research. Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to design every idea with the 48 hours we had. This situation helped me understand how to prioritize the most important aspects of a design.
If we did have more time to work on Motivator, I would have focused on developing our ideas that didn’t make the final design because of our time frame. For example, we wanted to provide mental health resources for users to have. Although we did include a mockup of possible mental health articles, I would have enjoyed exploring more resources.