August, 2018

APPY MAKES YOU AND KEEPS YOU HAPPY!

ux challenge

There is a misconception that people work to become more successful and only then they can become happy. But researches show that people should first feel happy in their life and then it will lead them to success at work or in other aspects of their life. People;

• need a way to focus on their happy moments or memories.

• need a way to spend more time with their loved ones because sharing makes people happier.

• need a way to remember their happy moments.

How might we train our brains to become happier?

ux solution

An app where people interact in a closed group of friends or family on a horizontal timeline. Throughout the day they upload a picture, an emoji, or a text on their timeline. If someone uploads an unhappy emoji, the app would recognize it and it would remind them of a happy memory (a picture on the database of the app; either a picture uploaded earlier or a picture imported from other social media accounts). People load ‘diamonds’ to the pictures, and the pics with more diamonds (most precious memories) would be reminded more often. People also react to others’ logs; i.e. send them an encouraging message. 

the process

MARKET analysis

After the initial hypothesis and analysis of some academic researches done about happiness, I did a competitive analysis. To determine my competitors I checked digital solutions that have the purpose of keeping people happy. Either a mood tracking app, a journal or even Facebook memories were in my scope. I analyzed them for several aspects and finally to determine my digital product's point of difference, I analyzed them on a Market Positioning Map for 3 key points; visuals, app ratings, and percentage of free usage. 

USER RESEARCH

To get quantitative answers I did a survey focusing to ask WHAT, WHY, HOW, and WHERE questions to get good insights on my problem. I conducted it via Google Forms and got 40 answers over a night. I also interviewed 6 people to have more qualitative answers. When I analyzed the answers, I saw that both the survey and the interview insights aligned. 

ANALYSIS PROCESS: I first put all of my user research findings on an Affinity Map. I analyzed them under 2 super headers. 

1. Why? — as of why people feel unhappy?

2. How to Solve? — as to how do people currently cope with this feeling.

   1. Alone. (Concrete & Abstract Solutions)

   2. With People. (Concrete & Abstract Solutions)

LOW FIDELITY WIREFRAMES AND USER TESTS

Here are the low-fidelity wireframes. I made 2 versions of them and 2 sets of user tests. First, I tested with 6 people. The tester mostly struggled to find out how to check the timelines. They expressed they needed signifiers/arrows to right and left to understand the swiping effect. However, I wanted to keep the visuals simple and I tried adding five instructional onboarding screens. They worked well on the second testing phase. 

MID FIDELITY WIREFRAME

VISUAL BENCHMARK

ATOMIC DESIGN

My style tile is composed of 9 main colors. For texts, I wanted to use these colors as well but they didn’t pass the contrast ratio test, that’s why I used dark grey for all texts in the app.

I included basic geometric shapes on my style tile out of which I first created a pattern (you can see just below the color circles) and then had the idea to use these shapes on the timelines, where each shape would represent a specific log.

For typography, I chose to use a sans serif font with thin strokes; Raleway. Another reason for this typography was the fun and joyful movement of its number of characters. I will use a lot of numbers to state the timing on the timeline and Raleway would give them a joyful personality.

the OUTCOME

LEARNINGS

I learned to listen to the users at every single chance because the insights they are giving may lead to interesting decisions about my product. In this project, I had the ‘like’ feature for pictures. The picture that had more likes were appearing more often as reminders. However, one incident during my user tests made me think of this feature more in detail. A tester didn’t feel very comfortable liking a picture of herself while uploading it to her timeline; it made her feel arrogant. I explained to her that it wasn’t about liking the picture itself but was more about the specific memory. But when I thought about it later, actually the main idea was that our memories are very precious to us. The happiest ones are the most precious ones. So we are not ‘liking’ them in this sense, but we are claiming that they are ‘precious’. That’s how I came up with the diamond shape and sparkles instead of conventional hearts. The sparkling diamonds then became the key moment where the users smiled during tests.

APPENDIX

Read about the full process on my medium post here for the UX and here for the UI process.