Echo A service that provides a platform for people to self reflect and become more aware of their lifestyle patterns, by helping them to pinpoint areas of their life that bring them personal enjoyment and supporting them to experience these more often
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Course: Final year project @ CIID Duration: 12 weeks Advisor: Heather Martin Role: User research, analysis and problem framing, Idea generation and development,UI design, User scenarios, Experience prototyping, Final designs of service solution and touch points, Video Prototyping (filming and editing) Honors: Awarded a merit of distinction by a board of external examiners Bill Moggridge (IDEO) Mikal Hallstrup (Designit) and Gillian Crampton Smith (IUVA)
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Context My final project was an exploration into how personal informatics can facilitate behaviour change, enabling people to feel like they have a more balanced life. Essentially, what are the possibilities when people are made more aware of their lifestyle patterns?
Final Concept Echo is a service that provides a platform for people to self reflect and become more aware of their lifestyle patterns, it helps them pinpoint areas of their life that bring them personal enjoyment and supports them to experience more often. The service works by using GPS tracking and direct reporting (data input) through the users smart phone. It allows them to reconnect to what their day-to-day life looks like by building up a map of how they spend their time, with who and how happy they are.
The following video will show you a demonstration of what the Echo service is, how it works and the benefits of using it.
Concept Video for the Echo service
In the following video you will see a user scenario of how the echo service can be integrated into your day to day life.
User Scenario Video
What is the value Giving people a tool to reflect, allows them to reconnect to what their day-to-day life looks like and understand what they spend their time on, with who and how happy they are. In turn this allows them to pinpoint areas of their life that bring them personal enjoyment. By giving people the platform to see these trends and patterns in their behaviour and opportunities for change they might normally miss, it can help people moderate their behaviour in a number of positive ways. The service is not designed to control behaviour, but to monitor and display actions in a way that will raise questions with the person.
......If you want to find out more keep reading for an insight into my project process!
Project Process: How did I get here Process Diagram (Click image to inlarge)
Initial Research Before i carried out my user research I had an objective and questions i wanted to understand. These were;
>What does it means for people to live a balanced life (subjective to the individual)
>What are people’s personal values they need to meet to feel comfortable in their lifestyle.
> How does this change depending on what stage of their life they are at.
> What personal strategies or tools do they use to achieve this.
To understand what it meant for different people to feel balanced at different stages of their
lives, I did research with students, couples working full time, and families.
Map of User Research Candidates (click image to inlarge)
For each person I carried out a 2 hour research session with them, where I asked a number of questions and used a number of tools to provoke and trigger discussion. These included
a card sorting activity, time line maps, a tool to map peoples prioritises and diaries to get an insight into peoples routines over a longer period of time.
User Research Tools (click image to inlarge)
Research Analysis After carring out the research i created character boards for each person, and picked out insights and observations that were the most surprsing, interesting, and ones that reacurred. For each insight i would then ask "What does this mean" and then create a mini design challenge for it. At this point three themes emerged. These were "Long distance communication with friends and family" "Motivation to live a healthy lifestyle" and "Personal prioritising"
Character boards and filtering insights
The theme i decided to focus on was personal prioritising, this was due to it being less mainstream, and therefor more of a challenge! I also felt it would bring more value if i could tackle the problem, and it was an area that was appropriate to apply personal informatics to. Below are some of the key insights that influenced my design challenge.
From these insights i was then able to formulate a design challenge to brainstorm ideas around and start the concept ideation phase. My design challenge was;
How might we create a customizable platform that will help people to reconnect to themselves, enabling them to prioritize in their lives by keeping track of and reminding them of past experiences that they can then use as a reference point to make more informed decisions?
Concept Development User scenarios
After initial brainstorming and idea generation around my design challenge i created scenarios, system diagrams and a service blueprint to further develop my idea and define the user experience, the role of the service provider and the critical touchpoints. This was an iterative process that continued throughout my whole project.
Experience Prototyping Experience Prototyping #1
During my project I also used experience prototyping to help develop my ideas, test assumptions and simulate the experience I wanted to create. Throughout the process I conducted 3 different prototypes, to answer questions such as "what is like to have to trackyour actvities?" and "what motivates people to stick to a program?"
The links below will take you to the videos of the experience prototypes and my learnings.
Feedback
When I had completed my final Videos I was lucky enough to have to opportunity to go back to one of my original users to get feedback from her. It was great to hear her response to the idea that was based on her problem i established during my research. The image belows, shows what she said originally during my user research and her feedback after she saw my idea.
Feedback from original User
To view my process in more detail you can look at my blog, or to see my next steps please look at my final presenation.
