Introduction
When I was completing my Certification in UX/UI Design in Fall 2020, I had the opportunity to work with a fellow classmate on a mobile app design project. The goal of the app was to solve an everyday need of our chosen target market, working-class Millenials.
A Schlegel article (2017) stated that work-life balance may not only make you feel better, but it may also make you more productive at work. Schlegel (2017) suggested four ways to achieve a better work-life balance which are to disconnect from work when not working, to schedule your life like you schedule your work, to use your vacation days, and to use your time at work efficiently.
An appropriate and healthy work-life balance is, in my opinion, extremely important to an individual’s overall happiness. Equil is here to help you find the balance.
Role and Responsibility
To complete this mobile app prototype, I partnered up with classmate Andy Le. With myself as the Project Manager (PM), we stuck to a tight timeline to create this complete project within the two-week working period. Along with being the PM for the group, I took on the responsibility of conducting several user interviews, creating the storyboard and user flow, creating the digital wireframes (from a combination of sketched screens done by Andy and myself), along with any clickable prototypes.
Tools Used
•Miro
•Adobe Illustrator
• Figma
• Adobe XD
Problem
Through the conduction of user interviews with various individuals in our target market, we discovered that the most common method of maintaining a healthy work-life balance was to spend time with friends or family. Most individuals said their process for making plans outside of work was by text message/DM on social media. The issue most of our users had with that method is that it’s extremely time-consuming to plan anything involving more than one other person. It can take hours or even days to coordinate schedules, depending on the number of individuals involved.
The average millennial has a very ambitious lifestyle and focuses all their time on work, thus leading to early burnout. How might we develop an app in order to help users socialize more frequently with their friends and achieve their ideal work-life balance?
User Research
As a team, Andy and I developed a user research plan that began with creating a Proto Persona (Figure 1.a). We based the questions that we developed for our User Interviews based on this persona, which kick-started our entire process.
Research Objectives
• To understand our user’s process for planning group activities.
• To understand our user’s understanding of what a work-life balance is and their opinion of their own personal work-life balance.
• To understand our user’s process for staying organized and how they feel about it.
Figure 1.a
User Interview Results
Interview Results
Affinity Diagram
Empathy Map
User Persona
Ideation
After conducting our user research and gathering/organizing the data, Andy and I began the brainstorming and ideation phase of our project.
Feature Brainstorming
Using the data we gathered from our user interviews and the concepts we developed, we started brainstorming the main features of the mobile app. The “I like, I wish, What if” method was used to ideate our possible features, with the team then dot voting to narrow down a smaller selection (Figure 2.a). That selection was then used in a prioritization matrix (Figure 2.b) to determine which features would be most valuable to the user.
Figure 2.a
Figure 2.b
Storyboard
Sketched Wireframes
User Testing
After completing the ideation phase of our project, which included a low fidelity clickable prototype, we moved on to user testing. We completed five user tests and obtained some really vital feedback, some of that being that the users couldn’t intuitively achieve the main goal of the app.
After organizing the feedback (Figure 3.a and 3.b) of these user tests, we took a step back to re-evaluate our user flow, focus on our main features, and create our iOS prototype.
Figure 3.a
Figure 3.b
Low-Fidelity Wireframes
Mid-Fidelity iOS Wireframes
iOS Prototype
