About the Project
This project was completed as a capstone project at the University of Washington by undergraduates in the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. My team partnered with focused, a young startup, to design a mobile application to support their service and users.
What is focused?
Focused is a startup with the mission of helping users work toward reaching their personal and professional goals. Daily wake-up calls, community working sessions, and weekly planning sessions help users create a morning routine, structure their day, and stick to their goals. As of now, meetings take place on Google Meet, and communication with users is accomplished through email or text messages. Currently, focused is developing a companion application for their service and is exploring ways to improve their user experience. Read more about focused here.
Our Leading Design Question
How might we implement social features to increase engagement and accountability among users of focused’s application so that personal and professional goals can be accomplished?
Our Capstone Team
Design Lead (Me)
Research Lead
2 User Experience Designers
focused Executives and Hosts
What did we create?
The result of this project was a high-fidelity prototype of a mobile application to support and house focused's services. The application prototype features user profiles, messaging between groups and users, scheduling information, and goal setting capabilities. The application is ready to be tested with users to validate design choices.
What do Users Value?
Interviews with focused users and facilitators were conducted to gain insight into user experiences with the service and features that users would consider valuable in the development of the application. The interviews were conducted over Zoom, and were led by team members asking questions about user and facilitator experiences.
4 interviews were conducted, with 3 focused users and 1 focused host. Using thematic analysis, we reviewed transcripts of the interviews and organized findings into the following categories. These four categories led the ideation portion of our project and were the overarching theme of our application design. Full analysis of the interviews is available here.
Importance of Accountability
The focused users and facilitator that we spoke with repeatedly mentioned that sharing their goals and daily tasks makes them much more likely to accomplish them. When thinking about the focused application, we want our design decisions to revolve around increasing accountability amongst users, as this is one of the most important factors to their success.
P1: “But when you tell a whole group of people that that's your plans, it just automatically makes you, like, want to make sure that you actually do it, or at least it does for me because I'm a freelancer and I'm also big on keeping my word.”
P3: “The ability to check-in in the morning and have that simple facilitated call has made an enormous difference in how well I’ve been able to get through things.”
P4: “Having set time slots on my calendar every week is motivating and I like to have a consistent meeting where I can have a routine as a business owner.”
Communication and Connectivity
From our research, common pain points came in the form of having different time zones, balancing social interaction with work and size of meetings. The ability to have impactful conversations and curate groups with similar interests can help community members become more connected and hold each other accountable.
P2: “There's always that level of professionalism that you have to have obviously, but so we're not gonna be like, hey, girl, what's up? Have a good day, that kind of thing? But like, when, if you're able to interact with them throughout the app, when within the app, can there be a level of like, hey, how's it going, you know, kind of thing because I know when I do an email, I have a structure in a certain way because I'm just like, hello, you, you and then like, you know, I keep it professional.”
P4: “Since I am based in Hawaii being able to have more time slots would benefit me rather than always clicking the latest one… I try to go to community sessions however, I don’t have a set one. Most of my social interactions have been with facilitators”
P3: “If I see somebody post something and I want to follow up with them, now I’m taking over the channel. And I want to be able to connect with people outside of the main channel.”
Informative User Profiles
From our interviews, we believe that each user’s profile in the focused application can be designed to increase accountability and connection between users. Ideas include adding users as friends, biographies and information about each user, posting brief updates on accomplishments, listing goals for the day and week, and weekly reflections. Of course, introducing too many social media aspects will detract from the intent of the application, so features must be lightweight and limited.
P2: “Maybe just like being able to have that with just like one or two other people instead of like a whole group of people, maybe limiting how many people can actually see your goals within the app.”
P3: “That way we could introduce ourselves, we could say this is what I’m working on, that’s what you’re working on, here’s my media link, here’s my social media links.”
P3: “If we had a place to post our profiles. For example, ‘I’m a focused member, here’s my profile.’”
Community Discussion Groups
Many users agreed that a sense of community enhances their overall experience in interacting with focused’s services. The interview data suggests that having a non-intrusive means of communication among users is of high interest. By giving users the option to further converse and engage with other users outside of designated meeting times, they can set the necessary boundaries for themselves in terms of what they are seeking to gain from focused.
P3: “I think the way to avoid it from being a distraction is to make it brief distractions. Like, 'oh you’re so cool, I want to talk to you LATER. Let’s exchange contact information so we can follow up after.' The reason we logged in in the first place is to focus on the thing we’re trying to get done.”
P3: “The ability to communicate with each other, to have an asynchronous group, like a Facebook group, where we can communicate outside of the conversations would be really helpful.”
P4: "If you had an app like. How would you connect with other users, you know, like I I think the niche groups would be interesting.”
Generating Ideas
For this phase of our project, we held a co-design session with our team, focused users, and facilitators. Participants for this session were recruited through focused’s daily calls with users and through the company Discord server.
In this session, we began by introducing our four areas of interest from our research findings; importance of accountability, communication and connectivity, informative user profiles, and community discussion groups. We then conducted two ideation activities with the participants to gather ideas for the design of user profiles and discussion groups. Full co-design session results available here.
Activity 1: Rapid Ideation
The first activity asked participants to use sticky notes to list important features for each of these two design areas. Each participant then placed a star next to features that they liked or considered important.
User Profiles
Community Discussion Groups
Activity 2: Crazy 8s Sketching
The second activity asked participants to quickly create 8 sketches of potential profile and community discussion designs. Each sketch was created in one minute with four sketches for user profiles and four for community discussion groups. Each participant briefly shared their sketches and thought process while creating them.
Ideation Findings
After the session was completed, we analyzed the results and organized the various ideas by importance for each of our two design areas.
User Profile Features
Picture and Name
Status (online or offline) and what meetings this person is attending - optional
Answers to reflections questions (public visibility is optional)
Goals this person is trying to accomplish (big and small)
Biography
Background
Contact info
Community Discussion Group Features
General group message features and information
Ways to help a person who is stuck on a project
Fun methods of encouragement and celebration
Sharing goals
Ways to keep discussions on track
Polls
Initial Frames
Following the ideation phase, we began designing the features of our application. We created information architecture as well as low-fidelity wireframes which were enhanced into mid-fidelity wireframes. For our wireframes and prototypes up until the final version, we did not design for the "goals" or "schedule" pages of the application, which already exist within early alpha versions of focused's application.
Information Architecture
Mid-Fidelity Wireframes
Final Touches
After designing and wireframing the application, we moved on to finalizing high-fidelity versions the application screens and prototyping interactions and navigation.
High-Fidelity Prototype
The high-fidelity prototype shown in the video below was the last version created for our capstone project. Following the completion of the course and capstone, I further iterated upon this design and created an improved version of this prototype.
Final Prototype
Following the completion of the capstone, I spent many months refining my visual design and Figma skills. Because of this, I decided to iterate upon the prototype shown above and make improvements to the design. The main issues that I addressed in this iteration are:
Lack of contrast in many areas of the application
Inconsistent spacing between elements on pages
Missing goal setting and schedule pages of the application
Removing some elements that are distracting or unnecessary
User Profiles
Community Discussion Groups
Direct Messages
Scheduling and Goal Setting
Next Steps
Conduct comprehensive usability testing
Gather a group of focused users to test ability to complete tasks in the prototype
Interview users about layout and design of the application
Discuss additional features that would support users
Iterate upon current designs given testing findings
Implement more features or remove some that are not necessary
Expand prototypes for tablet and desktop viewports
Conduct more testing and iterate until satisfied with feedback
Package design components and screens for easy development
Begin developing the application
Reflection
Reflecting on the work of this project, I am very satisfied with the outcome despite the struggles we encountered. This was the largest scale design project I had worked on at the time, and designing a complete application system with a group of designers required much more communication that I had anticipated. Constantly updating other team members on small design changes or ideas was strenuous. However, our team proved its ability by designing an excellent application experience.
The final prototype includes everything necessary to support focused's service and users. From profiles and a messaging platform to goal setting and schedule information, the application provides a hub for all things focused related. As a design team, we were able to successfully implement lightweight social features that hopefully connect and promote productivity without being too distracting.
Working with a young startup on this project was a challenge at times. Recruiting participants from focused's relatively small user base was a struggle, with many interview no-shows and cancels. However, we were able to gather significant and useful interview data to inform our design decisions.
I am particularly happy with the way that the final prototype turned out. I sat with this project for about 6 months before revisiting it to iterate once more. I feel that my design choices in the final prototype accurately reflect my growth as a product and user experience designer since graduation, and I am excited for the next project I will begin working on.
