BORED NO MORE
A UX Design Project Responding to COVID-19
THE TEAM
This app proposal was the result of a 10 week long group project at UC San Diego. For this assignment I joined a team of cognitive science and visual art students to build an application exploring UX design through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic.
INITIAL PROPOSAL
Initially, my group decided to explore solutions for personal hygiene and grooming in quarantine, inspired by the fact that a few of my group members (myself included) were way overdue on getting our hair cut. Our initial proposal was to develop an app that would give people information on how to groom themselves at home. We thought that moving forward with this pretty broad idea could be interesting, and would educate people as well as help to break up the monotonous life that is self-isolation.
RESEARCH
QUESTIONNAIRE
After our initial proposal, we began conducting initial research. We sent out a questionnaire to gauge interest in our idea, and to see how successful people's experiences were if they had attempted self care at home.
INTERVIEWS
We then conducted interviews to get more detail on the kinds of routines people were doing to groom themselves. During the interview process, we found that there was one glaring commonality between our interviewees: people who were grooming themselves were doing so because they were bored and wanted to kill time in their day. Because of this we pivoted our focus away from grooming information in favor of developing a platform addressing the problem of boredom, particularly the boredom caused by coronavirius-related self isolation.
PERSONAS
Based on our interviews, we put together two personas in an attempt to encapsulate different kinds of people who might use our application. This allowed us as a team to get a better idea of who our potential users could be, and to reach a consensus as a group before moving forward with drafting our application.
STORYBOARDS
Working off of our personas, we posed different variations of our application to each other by creating storyboards, showcasing slightly different user interactions in order to accomplish the same goal: Using our app as a tool to alleviate boredom in quarantine. To do this, we wanted to create an app that would allow users to tailor an activity generator to their specific interests, utilizing the things they already have around their home.
WIREFRAME & LOW-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
Using Figma, we put together a rough outline of our app, which we then used to help reach a consensus on our proposed workflow and visualize our various interactions and how they would work together as a cohesive whole.
After completing our wireframe and agreeing on our overarching user journey, we then put together a higher, but still low-fidelity interactive prototype in Figma. We then presented our low fidelity prototype to other members of our class, and received some critique which we then incorporated in to our first high-fidelity prototype.
ROUGH HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
After working out any kinks in our basic user workflow, we put together a high-fidelity draft, deciding on an overarching visual look and feel. Our app prototype was almost done, however we wanted the opinions of some user testers before we presented our final proposal.
REVISIONS
During our last round of user testing, we interviewed people on their experience accomplishing set tasks within the app, and made adjustments where issues arose. During this stage, we made three changes to the interaction in the app.
1. Some users wanted to exit the activity generating filters early. To remedy this, we added a home button within the filter screens to allow them to exit this workflow at any time.
2. We also found that users were often confused by the wording on our filter pages. We changed the words to more accurately and clearly depict how each filter would affect the final outcome.
3. Users were confused about the interaction required to switch pages. Many were swiping to get from page to page due to the iconography at the bottom that was similar to that of an iPhone home screen. We changed the look of the footer to rounded buttons, both to fit with our design system and to more clearly show to intended interaction.
USER JOURNEY
HOME SCREEN
When the user opens the app, they are presented with our home screen. On this screen are 3 options: "Generate Activity", "Surprise Me", and "My Activities".
GENERATE AN ACTIVITY
If the user selects "Generate Activity", they are led through a series of filters, specifying their interests, their comfort level leaving their home, how much time they want to spend on an activity, and different materials they have around their home.
FINAL CHANCE
Once completing the filter pages, the user will encounter a page of common ingredients that will allow them to accomplish more activities.
ACTIVITIES
Once the user finishes the filtering process, they are given a random selection from a set of activities that meet their specifications. This screen shows the name of the activity, what materials they have to use in order to complete the activity, as well as resources for completing the activity.
If the user presses “Favorite”, the current activity is added to the “My Activities” page.
If “Re-Roll” is selected the app will generate a new activity based off of currently set parameters.
MY ACTIVITIES
This page allows users to see the activities that they have favorited. They can click on the activity to revisit any of their saved projects, instructions, or fun ways to kill time.
WRAPPING UP
All in all, this project was a great vehicle to explore my visual design and user research skills, specifically in the space of UX/UI design. It was also quite nice to work with a solid team with different educational backgrounds, furthering my appreciation for the different perspectives that come with working on interdisciplinary teams.
If you want to try out the full interactive prototype, please check it out below!