UX Research and Design Process for Mobile App
September 2017 - December 2017
With a team of four graduate students, I developed SleepSavvy - a mobile app that aims to help travelers adjust their sleep pattern with a team of four students for my first course, User-Centered Design, at the University of Washington’s Human Centered Design and Engineering program.
Exploring the User-Centered Design Process
The SleepSavvy project explores the overarching user-centered design process from user research methods that included online surveys, interviews, and competitive analysis, to persona creations, paper prototypes and usability testings, aiming to help jet-lagged travelers stay focused before, during, and after their travel.
“How might we design a tool that helps jet-lagged students and business travelers focus?”
The Challenge
People that travel for school or business often have to be alert the next day, or immediately after a long flight for a class or meeting. If they do not get an adequate amount of sleep while adjusting to their new time zone, they will not be as focused on the task at hand.
Solution
SleepSavvy is an app that aims to help travelers adjust to their new time zones by creating a tailored sleep schedule, sleeping reminder, and sleep pattern analyst, to help them relax before bedtime,
Research Questions
How do we help frequent travelers adjust their sleep patterns and jet lag?
What are some existing solutions in the market?
What are the problems jet-lagged travelers experience that hamper their ability to focus?
User-Centered Design Process
My Role
As a Researcher and Project Manager on this project, I:
Created and distributed online survey.
Analyzed and translated survey data to actionable design features.
Created and presented the final deliverable.
Research. We synthesized three personas that SleepSavvy aims to help staying focused from 57 online survey responses and 10 interview results.
Ideate. Created sketches of how the mobile app interface looks like, and how the user interacts with it; the most ideal paper prototypes were selected based on group consensus.
Evaluate. Paper prototypes used to simulate the “happy path” during in-class peer reviews, as well as five usability studies, to evaluate whether the proposed features would make sense to our desired users.
*Ideally, the process of prototyping and evaluating would be repeated before product launch. Given the time constraint in class, the process was only repeated once.
Launch. A demonstration video was created, illustrating how SleepSavvy works.
User Research Methods
Online Survey
A 5-minute long survey was created using Google Forms, then distributed on Facebook and through e-mails.
Survey Design. We asked multiple choice and matrix questions based on our personal experiences with jet lag as a starting point.
Our Goals. To learn about people's symptoms with jet lag, whether it was correlated with time difference of their destination, and how they adjusted their sleeping schedule before the trip.
User Interview
Qualitative Interview. We asked users to walk us through their activities before, during, and after travel. We asked them to think about their most recent trip to a different time zone. We wanted to know whether jet lag impacted these activities.
We also wanted to know if they took action to prevent jet lag, or boost their energy if they were already jet-lagged.
We collected data on their overall experiences when taking a trip to a different time zone.
Competitive Product Analysis
A preliminary research revealed Jet Lag Rooster, an existing online sleep scheduler product for travelers. We first tested this product among our team members, listing what we liked about its interface and asking ourselves how we would improve it.
We then conducted user interviews and evaluated how users interacted with the product and whether or not they would actually follow the recommended sleeping schedule.
We asked them what features they would add to the existing product to make it more intuitive and better.
Personas and Target Users
“I just make myself stay awake until a normal-ish bedtime.”
— Andrew James
“It’s hard to maintain focus with my clients post travel!”
— Doug Anderson
“I only have 5 days, I want to make the most of my trip!”
— Grace Chiara
Design Iterations
What did I learned from this project?
I learned the immeasurable value of user-centered design process; particularly, getting to understand people’s experience when traveling through different time zones and coming up with ideas to help them stay focused upon the return of their trip, and iterating the process for improvements.
