UI Design | Work, Study, Health, (Im)balance
Role / Fields: Web-based UI Design.
Team: Jonah Temple-Cole, Rafe Skidmore, James Macintyre
Brief: The world has been battling the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), While medical researchers and practitioners battle the virus, we as designers can still play a part. Due to social distancing restrictions,many of us are staying at home and sitting down more than we usually do. When forced to work from home, people tend to overwork themselves as the boundaries between work and free time are not clearly defined, rapidly leading to a lack of motivation (Liang, 2020). In this design brief, you will have the opportunity to design an interface that helps motivate users in some aspect of their daily schedule through an app that supports workload management.
Internal Consideration: As a result of remote-learning, this project was restrained by our team being unable to meet in person. A benefit however, is that our team were stakeholders within the audience of our brief and as such had the power of being expert citizens (Ogbu, 2017).
Challenge: Throughout our design process we constantly questioned ourselves - why would someone download this app? and further, is this inducing or reducing stress? As the primary source of stress within our problem space was screentime, we had to constantly reassess whether our solution would further contribute to 'app fatigue'.
Final Iteration: Our research revealed to us that there was no shortage of applications and developers producing productivity digital products. As such we found a gap in apps that do quite the opposite. In order to prevent app fatigue and support healthier work-life balance, we designed Breakpal. Breakpal is an app offered to businesses that helps employees to take breaks by lining up their schedules with colleagues to play social arcade games.
Building a foundation
Before we could delve into our ideation, it was important that we had an initial understanding of our problem space that was backed by research. To do so we utilised the Double Diamond design process model (Bánáthy, 1996). As such, our research process moved between divergent and convergent phases, where by our research sought to diverge by gaining knowledge, then converged through drawing patterns, and giving our findings meaning.
Iterating through continuous improvement
With our new concept in mind, we returned to Balsamiq to build a new wireframe that illustrated our new concept. This step is particularly important to allow us to to user test again in order to see if we had improved on our previous testing.
Ideating scenarios
With the insights from our user testing, we realised there were user scenarios that could improve by occurring more organically. As our app was intended to emulate certain elements of office life, we re-evaluated our wireflows to create more organic user scenarios. To do so, we returned to pen and paper as to liberate our ideation by alleviating the boundaries of digital tools.
Intial Research Data
-Competitor Analysis
-Online Ethnography
-Affinity Diagramming
-Affinity Diagramming
-Think Aloud Protocol
-Interviewing
Intial Research Data
-SUS testing
-Think Aloud Protocol
-Interviewing
Help along the way
