I am a User Experience Designer with a background in education and psychology. I have a passion for empowering human behavior through technology and finding solutions to complex problems.
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Main Objective:
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My Role:
Project Title:
Main Objective:
Time Constraint:
My Role:
Habit Rabbit App
Empower diverse users' habitual behavior
10 weeks / <100 hours
User Experience Design & Research, UI Design
Smoking, substance abuse, poor diet, and lack of exercise continue to be the leading causes of death for people the world over. While there are complex and varying factors, for much of humanity it’s our behaviors that are killing us.
Much of my former career surrounding behavioral change involved getting my students from pre-change, pre-contemplation stage’s “I don’t have a problem”, to at least consider and perhaps even prepare for making changes in their lives. However, if a user was searching for and downloading an app they would be in preparation for change or facing a cycle of relapse.
Taking a look at the latest psychology and neurology studies into habit and cross referencing that with AA, an organization with undeniable success, we find many similarities:
• people first need to understand their habit
• mindfulness of the habit is encouraged through some process of recording or expression of each occurrence
• plan specific replacement behaviors that contain similar patterns of behavior/triggers
• social support, confidence, and agency drives user success
• creating healthy habits leverages similar mechanisms but in a different sequence
How can an app empower real, meaningful personal change for a diverse group of user needs?
This project emerged from the Interaction Design Specialization capstone for the University of California San Diego. My role was to design the user experience and user interface while managing project deadlines and deliverables.
My top down design approach included:
I was also responsible for coordinating with other designers for evaluations and feedback as well as creating the look and feel of the user interface.
The first stages of research focused on the foundation of the experience: what was behavioral change and how can we help users achieve it? A list of focus and follow up questions were created and five different potential users were interviewed to help calibrate early iteration. To fully understand habitual behavior, medical articles and published works were researched. This fleshed out both what made each user unique and what they had in common.
Using user-centered design techniques like card sorting, paper prototypes, and competitive analysis, I was able to rapidly iterate and uncover the basic user needs and how they might be structured. Rapid prototypes were built and tested. There was one problem. Looking at prototype interactions there were evident cognitive delays beyond experiencing a new interface. Something in the delay and users' faces was telling me that there were too many ideas. Something large was going to have to go.
I played with the notion of not having a social function for the app. Many new designs were forgoing this feature to create a more streamlined experience and letting users connect on facebook groups, etc. During competitive analysis however, I discovered that an older habit app still had a vibrant community that interacted and supported each other daily. This information and the understanding of how important social support is for behavioral change cemented the feature for the app.
Heuristic evaluations where knocking out any kinks in the rapidly growing prototype as I balanced the experience's flexibility and complexity. Habit creation was refined into two tailored paths, one for growing a healthy habit and one for breaking an undesired habit.
Early designs had feature bloat that was evident during testing, with users hesitating or making errors during navigation. This was evident across timed tests, objective tests, and a sense of users' vocal and facial responses. Alternative tests without an educational tab showed a significant reduction in errors and cognitive burden. Instead, educating users on behavioral change was integrated with both creating habits and within the Community features.
During research I came across many limitations of onboarding. The solutions where often to make the experience as short as possible with a benchmark set at complete failure (user deletes the app). However, I'd like to explore further how many users read and retain the information that is trying to be delivered. Onboarding is basically a one-way line of communication that speaks over the action the user had in mind when first opening the app. To counter this, the concept of a conversation-like sign up and tutorial that embraces a user's first action emerged. Initial fears were that it might take users too long, that they might feel trapped, or that they might just prefer a short onboarding experience. The prototypes were presented to two different sets of diverse users:
A: Users were presented the more traditional design in which they swipe through a short onboarding (3 screens), sign up via a form, and create their first habit.
B: Another group of users were tasked to sign up and create their first habit but they did so through the a conversationally-inspired, interactive tutorial.
One of the things I love most about user experience design is the distinct flow and phases in design as a project progresses. Early on, I wanted to know exactly what the problem was. What did experts know? What did users feel? What has worked and not worked for others? Basically, what am I even trying to design for?
Once I knew what the problem was the project hits a phase of iteration, first big and wild, then more refined. Using my research as a foundation, I could develop creative solutions and, from there, perform further testing to uncover blindspots and missed opportunities.
The whole experience of designing this app reaffirmed my love for user experience design. The big questions, using empathy to get in users' heads, uncovering juicy problems, puzzling through solutions, digging through research to uncover insights, and all the design iterations created an engaging and rewarding jouney with key lessons along the way.
I'm a UX Designer living in Telford, Pennsylvania.
I see UX as the very core of design, one that bridges human capacity and innovation to create successful products.
