Sweetener Mobile Experience

As a part of a graduate course in User Centered Design which is offered by Human Centered Design and Engineering department at the University of Washington in Autumn 2021, Sweetener is designed as a mobile app that allows people to strengthen connections with their loved ones and creatively express affection and support with customizable virtual letters. At the final showcase, we received very positive feedback from target users on successfully aligning the concept with visual designs.‍

‍Duration: 10 weeks (September 2021 - December 2021)‍‍

Team: User researcher, Product manager, Product designer

Research

To evaluate our initial design question and narrow down target users, we conducted three exploratory research methods.

Interviews
6 participants

Survey
38 responses

Competitive Analysis
12 products

Interview

Goal

To understand each primary target user's personal experience with well-being and sense of purpose and fulfillment in college.

Findings

Key findings are;

Participants feel fulfilled when progressing toward goals, prioritizing health, connecting with family, friends, and communities, and having a balanced life.
School and work have taken over the majority of the time and they wish to change that.
They're often too busy to reach out to people in their cohort or make new friends.
They feel depressed when they feel isolated from their community or that their work is meaningless.

Survey

Goal

To identify characteristics, behaviors, and trends for a larger group of our primary target users.

Findings

Key findings are;

Participants feel stressed and overwhelmed in daily life.
Talking to friends and family is their preferred way to cope with stress and reflect on their wellbeing.
They get overwhelmed by trying to balance everything, and often feel that they devote too much time to school and work over taking care of their health, exploring creative hobbies, and strengthening social connections.

Competitive Analysis

Goal

To assess the solutions currently available to our primary target users.

Findings

Identified potential gaps are;

Allowing users to customize methods of reflection and design their own prompts, affirmations, and activities.
Creating physical artifacts to refer to when overwhelmed.
Fostering community around mindfulness in an app.

Persona

Based on our research findings, we defined personas to represent our primary users to understand our target users better. We determined the themes of each persona based on an affinity diagram where we individually wrote sticky notes of user goals, then grouped those into broader categories.
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I suggested to conduct affinity diagram method in person and led working on visual design of the persona such as layout and color theme.

Affinity Diagram with My Team

Personas

Design Goals

We defined the following broader design goals as requirements that our solution should satisfy.

Refined Design Question

How can we help college students manage their stress?

Our primary goal is to help college students prioritize their well-being. Through our interviews and survey, we observed how stressed and overwhelmed they are by the many facets of life they’re trying to balance, so managing stress has become our more granular focus. We learned that reflection can be helpful in exploring ways to cope with stress and determining what triggers stress responses, but isn’t always calming in itself, so it may act as an element in our solution, but isn’t the overarching goal.

Ideation

Sketch

We conducted three rounds of iterative sketching, each followed by discussions of strengths, weaknesses, feasibility, and originality. We then identified common features and labeled each sketch by feature to determine the final three solutions to re-sketch.

Labels

First Round

Second Round

Final Round

Re-Sketch

To finalize the ideation, I conducted a re-sketch session by collaborating with another designer.

Community-Generated Voice Recordings

Select friends, family, and other contacts to record supportive voice memos that the user will be sent at a later date, when they indicate feeling a certain way (i.e. sad, overwhelmed, lonely).

Reflection-Based Virtual Community Gardens

By reflecting in the app, users grow a customizable garden. They begin with one plant of their choosing, and each day that they reflect, that plant grows. After certain milestones (i.e. 1 week streak of reflecting daily), they’re able to select new plants to add to their garden. If they go a certain amount of time without reflecting (i.e. 1 week without reflecting), plants start to shrink back down.

Medium-Fidelity Prototype

I updated wireframes that the team created to color CTA buttons, add shadows and a status icon to ensure that interactive components are easy to identify for a medium-fidelity prototype.

Home

Create Sweetener - Entered

Usability Testing & Evaluation

To identify usability errors and understand target users' mental models while interacting with the app, we designed and conducted usability testing with four participants.
During the usability testing, I facilitated the test by following the study guide that the user researcher created, took notes, and took a video. After finishing the sessions, we listed up suggested changes for the final prototype.

Key Suggested Changes

Allow customizable scheduled sweetener delivery date - let users decide when a sweetener will be sent (immediate or in the future).
Allow users to skip choosing gift wrap/bow.
Allow users to preview their sweeteners on the preview screen so they don’t need to go back.
Use pastels/candy shop colors to better match the “Sweetener” language and vibe of the app.

Design Solution

(Re)Scoping Problems and Solutions

Synthesizing all the research and test findings, we defined solutions for the final prototype based on identified problems.

Final Design Solutions

Open Sweetener - Home

Create Sweetener - Drawing

Create Sweetener - Preview

Request Sweetener

Hi-Fi Prototype

I created the final prototype with small motion design and video to interactively communicate our design solution with the audience at the final design showcase.

Open Sweetener

Create Sweetener

Sweeteners from peers and our professor

We received heart-warming feedback from peers at the final design showcase. Here are some. ("Purpose panda" is our team name)

Reflection & Future Steps

Collaboration is one of the most powerful tools to explore diverse design solutions that might not be achieved by an individual.
Transparent and clear communication within the team also boosts collaborations as a meaningful process.
For future steps, I would like to review user flow to provide better screen flows, and conduct inspiration research and usability testing to align usability of the visual design better with pastel/candy theme.

Thank you team Purpose Panda for being incredibly collaborative and thoughtful to turn users' pain points into tangible solutions! I'm very excited to bring all my learnings from this project and you all to the next journey🐼 Go Pandas!