An Overview
College is one of the most empowering and exciting transitions in life as young adults get their first taste of independence, but also one of the hardest environments for maintaining healthy habits. This creates a difficult paradox as maintaining positive habits is one of the most effective tools for excelling in college.
'HabitU' is an app designed to help students prioritize, organize, track, and maintain the habits most important for success in college, from academic habits to the health and fitness habits that help students maintain a healthy body and mind.
The Challenge
- College is one of the hardest environments for creating and maintaining positive habits
- But positive habits are one of the most effective ways for college students to ensure their success
The Solution
- A habit tracking app designed specifically for and by college students
- Focus on the habits that college students want to and should be prioritizing
- Social componenents to the app and ways to "gamify" it to motivate users through competition and the desire to prove themselves to their friends
User Research
User Interview
The project began by interviewing several college students. The following interview questions were asked to get a better sense of what habits college students want to maintain, how they successfully maintain the ones they do right now, why they are struggling to maintain others, what components of an app they believe would help them to achieve their habits, and what componenets of an app in general make it a positive app experience for users.
Data Analysis
Based on the responses to the above user interview questions, the following datapoints were gathered and organized into an affinity diagram:
Sketching and Prototyping
Based on the datapoints above, preliminary sketches were done quickly to get design ideas out onto paper, and then a low fidelity prototype was created through Balsamiq to further refine the best ideas from the sketching brainstorming.
Quick sketches
Low Fidelity Balsamiq Prototypes
Based on the sketches above, a low fidelity prototype was created through Balsamiq to better organize the layout ofthe app screens as well as begin to roughly design the app's interactivity.
High Fidelity Prototype Development
I then began developing a high fidelity prototype on figma based on the work above. The first iteration of the prototype was very simplistically designed with minimal interactivity:
I did some basic user testing to see what was working and what was not in this prototype and took the following notes:
At this point inthe design process a lot of my users' feedback was based on UI and aesthetic visual components. To get more usability modifications I will conduct more user research and usability testing in the future.
High Fidelity Figma Prototype
From the iterations of prototypes above, the following high fidelity prototype was produced and tested:
Evaluation and User Testing
When the above prototype is finally complete, I will do more formal user testing of the app.