#iteration5

Adding a mood

Date picker for adding a mood

Reflective questions 

The ability to add more as a journal entry? (like the atlas)

A save button

Gestures 

deleting - swiping like iOS

Memories

A save button / tapping else where to save

An undo button (also have this… in general)

Information card:

Disclaimer for mental health issues

Reminders

Location based instead of time

Tutorials

Animation (less bouncing)

Look at the proximity of the textboxes

Difficulty of Tasks:Results to the hypotheses & Test:

Tutorial – Having a progress bar and a list of tutorials to go through

Hypothesis: Having the instructions can improve the understanding of how to carry tasks.

Result – Seeing the list helped people understand that there were more features in the app even though they did not get to try it. The animated yellow boxes helped people understand the location of buttons. However, I don’t know if people actually retained how to do tasks without the help of a tutorial.

Information cards – Having the green info buttons

Hypothesis: Having the info cards can help increase understanding to the point of the different features in the app.

Result – The instructions got really good reviews. The participants seemed to understand more of the application. The layout and the images/iconography used also helped with the understanding. However, I don’t know if people actually retained the information in the cards.

Adding moods – Changing the way of collection of moods

Hypothesis: People will understand themselves more, and it would be more flexible when adding more than one moods (at one time, or during the day)

Results – Participants understand being able to add more moods, and how two opposing moods can lead to one new mood.

Stats – Changing the way users add moods to another day

Hypothesis: Automating this would allow users to not be confused with how to add moods for separate days

Result – Participants seemed to understand how to do this without confusion.

Personalisation in Memories – Adding a way for users to change the layout and what is shown in the app

Hypothesis: Users will feel that the personalisation in this app is accounted for.

Result – Participants liked the personalisation and how users are able to add/get rid of entries.

Concerns

The task descriptions being too specific and too leading – participants might not have to figure things out too much because of the specific tasks

I feel like I gave a lot of context to users which may have increased their understanding of the application, and most of what I said might have lead users on.

Features that participants enjoyed:

Memories (layout and the personalisation)

Atlas

The aesthetic, flow and layout

Icons are understandable

Accessible features (bottom nav bar)

Animations

Thoughts Information cards:

Helpful for understanding each section

Images/icons alongside were helpful

Tutorials:

Helpful

The animation was a bit too much

Proximity could do with some work

Difficulty of Tasks:

Most of the tasks were on the ‘easy’ part of the scale. The atlas and the stats task were the most challenging out of all. While the making the checklist was the easiest task.

Usability Scale:

With lot of the ‘information’ based statements, participants seemed to think that the app needed information on the screen to explain the context and what was going on in the application. However, the grading went well, and it has definitely improved from last week!

Interesting notes:

Some participants brought up interesting things I might have a look at:

Date picker for adding a mood

Reflective questions – The ability to add more as a journal entry.

Reflective questions – a save button

Some gestures need work (deleting - swiping like iOS)

Memories – a save button / tapping else where to save.

An undo button

Disclaimer for mental health issues

Define the goals of the test:

Questions/hypothesis

Tutorial – Having a progress bar and a list of tutorials to go through.

Hypothesis: Having the instructions can improve the understanding of how to carry tasks.

Information cards – Having the green info buttons

Hypothesis: Having the info cards can help increase understanding to the point of the different features in the app.

Adding moods – Changing the way of collection of moods

Hypothesis: People will understand themselves more, and it would be more flexible when adding more than one moods (at one time, or during the day)

Stats – Changing the way users add moods to another day

Hypothesis: Automating this would allow users to not be confused with how to add moods for separate days

Personalisation in Memories – Adding a way for users to change the layout and what is shown in the app

Hypothesis: Users will feel that the personalisation in this app is accounted for.

Concerns

Some limitations with my knowledge of animating on principle

Not having a fully fledged prototype – limiting how people use the prototype that they might do to the real thing

The task descriptions being too specific and too leading – participants might not have to figure things out too much because of the specific tasks

Areas of Interest

The tutorial

Animations

Mood collection

Info cards

Purpose

Trying out the tutorial

Trying out the mood collection

Getting thoughts on the extra information

Determine format and setting of study:

Face-to-face and in-house at university – in a lab setting. It will also be moderated by me, as it will provide me with richer design interests. I would also be able to interject and ask questions and prompt comments from participants. Because this is an in-person test, the interaction feels more personable, and I am able to detect cues such as body language and facial expressions.

Number of users:

Nielsen recommends 2-5, and I will aim to get 5 people.

Recruit the right participants:

My target audience involves:

People that primarily use print journals and planners

People that are tech savvy

People that are aged between 18-25 years old

Tasks:

Specific tasks – although there is a specific task and flow, I am able to also learn how people discover and explore information by watching them in-person and hearing their comments.

Collecting metrics:

To collect data to analyse, other than writing notes on the participants’ actions, I also plan to have a post-evaluation survey which will ask users about their thoughts and how likely they would use the app over their current diary. I also encouraged the participants to make comments or suggestions whenever they felt appropriate.

Another thing I have taken from the critique was the idea of an onboarding or tutorial process. I want to exercise and design this now so I know how to implement this for the exhibition prototype. I wanted to integrate both instructional cards and also interactive tutorials, with the incentive of having ‘progress’ in the app and listing out tasks users can complete.

According to Tubik Studio (2017), tutorials are able to boost engagement and show the most beneficial sides of a system to the user. Babich (2017) recommends using visuals along side an interactive tour which are triggered when the user reaches an appropriate section in the app.

Wireframe/user flow

Ui design

References:

An interesting thought that I came across during the crit session was to think about users when displaying things they might not want to see. Facebook has a similar problem with their ‘on this day’ feature. They have tried to get around this by using algorithms and relying on users to personalise the kind of information they want to reflect on (Weinberger, 2017).

According to Lau, White,& Schnall (2013), we experience things with the goal of happiness in mind. Eg, we go on holiday to experience positive emotions. Newman (2016), discusses how thinking of times when we have overcome challenge allows us to increase our self esteem and motivation. However, over thinking about the happy memories gets rid of the mystique and lessens our positive experience of that memory (Lyubomirsky, Sousa, & Dickerhoof, 2006).

With my app, I dont want users going away and feeling horrible or bad, and I want users to be able to look at happy times too. To get around this, I want to allow personalisation, and not put in little details that may get rid of the thrill and the mystique around happy moments. Doing this, alongside displaying the information in a different way. There is also a section to explain to users about the importance of reflection.

Wireframe/User flow

Ui Design

(I also have moved the night mode button to somewhere much more accessible.)

According to Caldeira, & et al., (2017), most of the apps that they have looked at lack support for the preparation and action stages for analysing moods. Preparing users include explaining how to track mood, and the action stage mostly refers to recommendations users get based on their personalised data. (The other two stages are Collection of data, and reflection, in terms of the visualisation of the data gathered.) 

Another feature they found that was missing in apps were the ability to look through all the data easily and filter through them.

For the stats page, I followed the four main stages that Caldeira, et al. (2017) had followed:

Preparation - instructing users about tracking (how and why), and how beneficial it could be.

Collection - the interface for collecting the moods

Reflection - visualisation for the mood data

Action - further actions users can take based on their moods.

The two stages I coincidentally need to work on are the Preparation and the action stages.

Wireframe & Userflow

Stats Screens

References:

Caldeira, C., Chen, Y., Chan, L., Pham, V., Chen, Y., & Zheng, K. (2017). Mobile apps for mood tracking: an analysis of features and user reviews. AMIA Annu Symp Proc, 2017, 495–504.