Well…

It’s been really great working for another healthcare startup, using technology to help those with medical ailments. In this journey I’m working in the mental healthcare space, providing human-powered services to those who lack it for many a reason. Things like the cleaning of your home, some help picking up groceries or other items, sometimes a simple conversation with another human being. Our product here at Papa is a bridge of sorts, a method of connection in an already connected yet oddly disconnected world (Hence why we exist). Yet, is our product just merely a bridge? Or is it more?

Along my career journey, I’ve had an intuition that product teams tend to think of technology solutions as means to ends. Products as just a way to get something done. You pull it out of your pocket, look at it for a few minutes, then put it away. As builders of these products, we seem to be ok with saying..Hey as long as it works well then we’re good. Hey as long as it looks good then people will enjoy it. I’ve been guilty of thinking this way. But it seems that this ethos has penetrated into the very fabric of design culture. Of signing onto Slack and then grabbing a few tickets to build another feature…punching the clock to build another means to an end for someone else.

With experience working on several different teams now, with sizes ranging from smaller freelance groups to large multi-national corporations, I have begun to ask…where is the soul in technology? Are designers just making things to make things, have the boxes we design in Sketch and Figma began to box our souls too?

Recently I binged several of my favorite Sci-Fi movies and shows… Ready Player One, WestWorld, Interstellar, Ex-Machina, Big hero 6 (Does that count?)…when I paused and started to see a common pattern amongst these films. The AI or technology that was built in these films had a personality. Or what seemed to be a personality or a presence for a machine…

These robotic characters had faces, they had goals (for better and worse), some of them had positive partnerships with human beings, they all had some sort of essence that contributed to the lives of the human characters in the movie. And although these movies were indeed science fiction, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to the apps and website interfaces we create today…

…When creating digital products we focus so much on the “User Persona”, that is, “a fictional representation of your ideal customer”. Who is our persona, someone may state in an intense product meeting. “Wait! We have to check in with our User Persona, will our “fictional representation of our ideal customer” think like this and use the product as such???”.

This is a great practice for designers because it allows us to always consider the mindset and behavior patterns of our users when creating solutions for them. We know our users like the back of our hands, we know their needs and pain points. Which is what allows us to make solutions that are precisely what our user needs. Fantastic.

But what about the product? Have we ever stopped to consider that the product may have a persona? Have we ever stopped to consider that we are building a thing with a personality (content), who is thoughtfully designed to assist human beings like a friend or a trusted partner would? Can the things we interact with begin to have a relationship with us human beings? A relationship built on trust and love, respect, and accountability? Can we build a product persona that has longevity, something that people can identify with an integrate into their lives like a friend?

I’m unsure if you have ever experienced this, but you may have an object either now or in your past, that has had some sort of partnership with you. Whether it was that pair of shoes you know are “lucky and work so well they helped you win the big game” on the basketball court. Or that one paintbrush that works better than the others? Maybe it’s that car that you can always rely on? Perhaps it’s the one rain jacket that you’ve brought on so many camping trips, it’s really been there for you when you need it most. Do certain objects seem to weigh so heavily on our souls that it is HARD to get rid of them? Do they seem to be so meaningful of an object, designed perfectly, integrated into a personal historical moment or experience that you regard this object with the same respect as…gasp…other people…

If you’ve had an experience like this, you may be on to something…In Japanese culture, informed by Shinto beliefs around notions of animism — a soul (“reikon”) lives within all existence and phenomena. Everyday things — from objects to plants to mountains — can be defined as “kami” or deities. Even so, the Japanese don’t really distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. When you fix a desk, for example, you heal its spirit.

I don’t believe this is far off in any way. I’ve seen people say similar things “Yeah those tires on the truck just give it a mean soul”. Or “Those shoes look really cute”, cute, as in the word used to describe a golden retriever puppy, is commonly used to describe an object. The examples are endless, however can digital product designers bring these feelings into machines?

Do we regard the digital products we create as means to ends, or as something with a personality and ability to build a relationship with human beings?Technology is used every minute of every hour, every single day. Are our tools just to be used to get something done? Or could we start with creating product personas that we believe in. Characters with personalities and souls, that have the potential to create relationships with those that use their time to interact and accomplish things in real life.

As A.I. technology progresses, as voice software, and data-driven design personalize your life..we still have the choice to shift our perspective, to slow down and begin actually crafting something with soul and purpose. Something that is more than a means to an end, something that we regard and respect because of the value and emotion it brings into our lives.

Can designers craft product personas that define “Who this product is, and what benefit it brings to humanity” in the same way as nurturing another soul in kindness, love, and respect.

I know I’ve begun to do so. Along the way I’ll document this journey and let you know how weaving personality and soul into digital products goes. I’m just trying to give the same experience to someone else, the same way my basketball shoes made me feel. Alive, present, confident. Those memories lasted…

For now meet one of the products I’ve built.

References:
https://www.joyokanji.com/status-updates/spirit-thing
https://theconversation.com/in-japan-supernatural-beliefs-connect-the-spiritual-realm-with-the-earthly-objects-around-us-125726

Product Personas: your product could have a pulse was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What you see here is an affinity diagram for an educational app I had the pleasure of working on with Lianne Yun and Gise Bertran. The beauty of creating an affinity diagram is to organize your quantitative and qualitative data in order to find patterns among users.

Numbers heavy, percentages on preferences, opinions from the current experience of a user. Data. It’s one of the best ways a designer can leverage a particular design solution, but does it tell the whole story?

Are our users numbers? Are they percentages with no names, no faces, and no feelings. Yes a data set can tell a product team what a user thinks right now, in the current survey or interview, at that current time. But there is so much more to our users!

Our users have lives, similar to ours, with jobs, families, struggles, and successes. They go eat pizza on Friday nights, kayak on the weekend, and catch their favorite shows on Tuesday nights. They may have low patience, pretend they aren’t home when door-to-door salesmen knock, and have yet to master that family lasagna recipe.

Our users are people too. More than that affinity diagram above, and definitely more than a percentage. However, are our teams taking into account the whole story, or are they quickly browsing over data sets to come to quick conclusions and moving on with the product creation process.

It’s easy to get lost in the numbers. It’s easy to forget that “users” are people too with lives very similar to yours.

As designers we need to gather the necessary data but also use UX strategies such as User Journey Maps to paint the whole picture of the people who will be using our products.

The usefulness of a user journey map is that we can mainly assume and demonstrate the current and possible way in which the user can interact with the product. We can better understand what our user is doing way before they even open your app/product, what are they trying to accomplish by doing so, and how this action plays a larger role into the daily life of a user. User journeys allow us to peer into the emotional and psychological aspects of the user, to see their point of view, and ultimately build the level of empathy needed to take your product/service from just good to dam near great.

Nielsen Norman Group provides these key steps below to crafting user journey maps:

Establish the “why and the “what”. First, identify the business goal that the journey map will support. Make sure there are clear answers to these basic key questions before you begin the process:

• What business goal does this journey map support?
• Who will use it?
• Who is it about and what experience does it address?
• How will it be shared?

Point of view:

First and foremost, choose the “actor” of the story. Who is this journey map about? For example, a university might choose either students or faculty members, both of which would result in very different journeys. “Actors” usually aligns with personas, if they exist. As a guideline, when creating a basic journey map, use one point of view per map in order to provide a strong, clear narrative.

Scenario:

Next, determine the specific experience to map. This could be an existing journey, where mapping will uncover positive and negative moments within that current experience, or a “to-be” experience, where the mapper is designing a journey for a product or service that doesn’t exist yet. Make sure to clarify the user’s goal during this experience. Journey maps are best for scenarios that describe a sequence of events, such as purchasing behavior or taking a trip.

Actions, mindsets, and emotions:

At the heart of a journey map’s narrative is what the user is doing, thinking, and feeling during the journey. These data points should be based on qualitative research, such as field studies, contextual inquiry, and diary studies . The granularity of representation can vary based on the purpose of the map. Is the purpose to evaluate or design an entire, broad purchasing cycle or a contained system?

Touchpoints and channels:

The map should align touchpoints (times when the actor in the map actually interacts with the company) and channels (methods of communication or service delivery, such as the website or physical store) with user goals and actions. These elements deserve a special emphasis because they are often where brand inconsistencies and disconnected experiences are uncovered.

Take time to craft user journey maps to paint the whole picture of the people who will be using your product. Generating a high level of empathy has many benefits such as gaining a loyal customer base and potentially higher sales. But most importantly, and between that lasagna recipe and Discovery Channel show, you will understand how your product is actually solving a problem in your user’s life.

As a matter of fact FPL (Florida Power & Light) performed incredibly post Hurricane Irma, restoring power to millions in a matter of a week. I hold the FPL field workers in high esteem, risking their lives to go out in the elements, working long shifts so that most of us can have access to our Wifi and cold A/C. I was without air for 6 days, complaining that FPL is not up-to-date with their technology, and dishing out my first world problems faster than I could eat the abundance of power bars in my pantry. . . Humbly though, I jumped into my backyard pool during the hot sun and realized how good we actually have it here in the U.S.A. compared to other countries that were not so lucky during Irma’s roll.

The long days offered contemplation however. Mostly alone in my own thoughts, or engrossed in the complaints of my family and close neighbors, I began to realize a pattern.

People’s complaints post Irma circled around a few repetitive phrases:

1. “It’s so hot”

2. When are they (FPL) going to restore my power. Why are they taking so long”

3. They restored ‘Enter Name’s’ power, why aren’t they working on ours.

4. “I’m going to go out there and find out where they are, and ask them to work on our power myself.”

Bonus: I overheard an FPL worker complaining that he was getting harassed by people asking about power restoration timelines and even being bribed to turn on their power before others.

The pattern appeared here. It wasn’t that FPL was doing a bad job, they were working extremely hard. It’s just that they lacked the ability to give personalized communication to their customers. They were perceived as inconsiderate, impersonal, and had poor communication. They lacked the same customer service experience they provided physically, to the rest of their major brand touch points including their website and mobile app. They have to show they cared.

Problem:

The only way to learn about power recovery was through broad statements on the news. Their website was overloaded with traffic, limiting a users ability to view any restoration information, and once logged in, the restoration information only catered to a “County View”. I also was alerted with a note saying that “there was no need to submit any tickets, FPL had it handled”.

People felt lost, unappreciated, and had minimal trust in the company they spend hundreds of dollars on each month.

After gathering this information, and with time to spare, I decided to redesign a flow for FPL.com.

The goal:

To establish a deeper connection with customers, to make them feel like FPL cared enough to give them tailored restoration information and to even check-in with real-time status.

The current design focuses on FPL’s “Power Tracker Service” which allows a customer to view power outages in counties near their home. The current service lacks:

1. An ability to view your home specifically.
2. An estimated time on when your power will arrive.
3. A way to become alerted on power status in your area and neighboring counties.

The solution:

I designed the flow below to tackle this goal. This flow includes:

1. An ability to hover over counties and see current power status.
2. An address bar at the top to go directly to your home.
3. A personal power tracker detailing your home’s service. When your power was lost, reasons why, and an estimated restoration date.
4. At the bottom of this power tracker is an ‘input phone number” feature. The goal here is for FPL to send customers a text update on restoration efforts to your area. This function only works if you sign-in to your FPL account beforehand, for privacy reasons.

Ideally, this flow’s goal is to provide real-time updates on the status of your power restoration. By being able to directly view your home’s data and then having the option to submit your phone number for text alerts, a user could potentially feel more connected to FPL and valued/serviced at all brand experience points.

Check out the flow below!

What do you think? Do you love it, do you hate it, would this flow allow you to feel more connected to FPL’s service? How are large companies today focusing on providing a full brand experience from physical efforts to digital? Is the overall brand experience on par at all points?

Let’s talk about it. Leave a comment below!

• Disclaimer: The views and design of this article do not reflect FPL’s business strategy or views. This is a re-design project of my own interests and effort.

FPL does not care about Florida. was originally published in Fluxyeah on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a matter of fact FPL performed incredibly post Hurricane Irma, restoring power to millions in a matter of a week. I hold the FPL field workers in high esteem, risking their lives to go out in the elements, working long shifts so that most of us can have access to our Wifi and cold A/C. I was without air for 6 days, complaining that FPL is not up-to-date with their technology, and dishing out my first world problems faster than I could eat the abundance of power bars in my pantry. . . Humbly though, I jumped into my backyard pool during the hot sun and realized how good we actually have it here in the U.S.A. compared to other countries that were not so lucky during Irma’s roll.

The long days offered contemplation however. Mostly alone in my own thoughts, or engrossed in the complaints of my family and close neighbors, I began to realize a pattern.

People’s complaints post Irma circled around a few repetitive phrases:

1. “It’s so hot”

2. When are they (FPL) going to restore my power. Why are they taking so long”

3. They restored ‘Enter Name’s’ power, why aren’t they working on ours.

4. “I’m going to go out there and find out where they are, and ask them to work on our power myself.”

Bonus: I overheard an FPL worker complaining that he was getting harassed by people asking about power restoration timelines and even being bribed to turn on their power before others.

The pattern appeared here. It wasn’t that FPL was doing a bad job, they were working extremely hard. It’s just that they lacked the ability to give personalized communication to their customers. They were perceived as inconsiderate, impersonal, and had poor communication. They lacked the same customer service experience they provided physically, to the rest of their major brand touch points including their website and mobile app. They have to show they cared.

Problem:

The only way to learn about power recovery was through broad statements on the news. Their website was overloaded with traffic, limiting a users ability to view any restoration information, and once logged in, the restoration information only catered to a “County View”. I also was alerted with a note saying that “there was no need to submit any tickets, FPL had it handled”.

People felt lost, unappreciated, and had minimal trust in the company they spend hundreds of dollars on each month.

After gathering this information, and with time to spare, I decided to redesign a flow for FPL.com.

The goal:

To establish a deeper connection with customers, to make them feel like FPL cared enough to give them tailored restoration information and to even check-in with real-time status.

The current design focuses on FPL’s “Power Tracker Service” which allows a customer to view power outages in counties near their home. The current service lacks:

1. An ability to view your home specifically.
2. An estimated time on when your power will arrive.
3. A way to become alerted on power status in your area and neighboring counties.

The solution:

I designed the flow below to tackle this goal. This flow includes:

1. An ability to hover over counties and see current power status.
2. An address bar at the top to go directly to your home.
3. A personal power tracker detailing your home’s service. When your power was lost, reasons why, and an estimated restoration date.
4. At the bottom of this power tracker is an ‘input phone number” feature. The goal here is for FPL to send customers a text update on restoration efforts to your area. This function only works if you sign-in to your FPL account beforehand, for privacy reasons.

Ideally, this flow’s goal is to provide real-time updates on the status of your power restoration. By being able to directly view your home’s data and then having the option to submit your phone number for text alerts, a user could potentially feel more connected to FPL and valued/serviced at all brand experience points.

Check out the flow below!

What do you think? Do you love it, do you hate it, would this flow allow you to feel more connected to FPL’s service? How are large companies today focusing on providing a full brand experience from physical efforts to digital? Is the overall brand experience on par at all points?

Let’s talk about it. Leave a comment below!

*Disclaimer: The views and design of this article do not reflect FPL’s business strategy or views. This is a re-design project of my own interests and effort.

Yes, a user may report an interesting point in an interview, but why, how does the product actually impact someone’s life? What else is there to the story, does a person use this product after lunch, or do they only use it on days where they feel happier than normal? There is a ton more to the average story of a “user”, a term we loosely throw around to describe the human we are learning about. A human, with a life often very similar to ours, with stress and success similar to ours.

As design researchers we are tasked with gathering data, but are we also tapping into raw human emotion and daily experience to discover the full story?

This post is inspired by this article written by By Doreen Lorenzo who interviewed Meghan McGrath, a design researcher at IBM. Below is an excerpt from the full article which you should take the time to read if you are working with research in any form.

“I think the responsibility of a design researcher is to push past assumptions, and to recognize the seemingly mundane details of everyday life that could lead to more successful human-centered design.

Our users don’t wake up into this generalized world and go to work. They sit in traffic, they buy underwhelming sandwiches in the cafeteria, they look at cat videos, and maybe they go into their office, and they’re really busy and interrupted all day, or maybe they’re very isolated. It’s helpful in design research to understand the small pieces of their realities in order to design something that will fit into that reality well.”- Meghan McGrath

Many businesses and agencies have gone through the pains of spending days coding projects, making them look superb, only to have the client disapprove, or worse yet fail to meet the needs of the user. This strategy waste time, which in turn waste money. Your team is burned out, they are disengaged and unwilling to put in their personal best just so this project gets finished and moved on with.

Your project costs may be uncomfortably higher because you don’t have a UX Design team whose sole job is to save you time and money, while giving the users what they actually need.

“User-Centered Design (designing with users in mind) ensures that your technology investments will meet customer needs and usability standards, resulting in higher user engagement, greater system efficiency and satisfied customers. Interaction designers quickly prototype and iterate UI designs based on user feedback before any code is written. This combination of expertise and process prevents expensive rework later because the system is designed right the first time.”- Chrys at Useagility

Where do you start if you want to try a different model to improve usability and decrease overall project development costs?

Try these 4 steps below with your design professionals.

1) Understand what “design” means in a product development world. We’re not talking about colors, logos or look-and-feel (visual design), we’re talking about workflow, navigation, information structure and use of standard interaction controls (interaction design). Get your team a good interaction designer, let that person talk with users and iterate the design via low-fidelity prototypes in a tool like Axure or Invision.

2) Find out when design is happening in your current development process and who is doing it. Then focus on shifting discovery and design prototyping to a UX resource. Use inexpensive design prototyping tools to quickly iterate UI concepts and (here’s the KEY to success) test designs with users in the early product design and planning stages.

3) Evaluate your team based on their actual activities and capabilities, not their titles. You’re not “doing UX” just because you have a UI developer. Unless your front-end developer is spending as much time talking with users as she is coding and bug fixing, you’re not there. UI developers are necessarily entrenched within development teams and are given full workloads writing code, performing QA and bug fixing. After your UX team has done their job, your UI developer will code faster and have less re-work.

4) Finally, code faster and with more confidence that you’re building the right solution. Remember, you SHIFTED design time from other team members to your UX expert. Make sure you realize that time trade off in shorter development timelines. If the UX and UI has already been designed, tested with users and reviewed with stakeholders, the rest of the team has a LOT less work to do. By this time, developers know the actual scope of what’s coming. They have fewer design decisions to debate and they have interactive design prototypes to follow that spell out what they need to build.

Remember, incorporating UX should be a time and money saving activity for your projects. At a minimum, expect it to be cost neutral with less customer support costs and increased revenue as positive business outcomes.

For the full article please read “Why Your Total Project Costs Are Actually Higher Without UX” written by Chrys at Useagility.

However, how far down does this personalization rabbit hole go? With the growth of Artificial Intelligence, products potentially will learn from us, our daily habits, our behaviors, and begin working for us instead of users working the product.

As product designers focused on balancing the needs of business goals and user goals, how will we integrate AI into our product experiences? Will users claim a necessity for AI in the products they use, or will it become to intrusive for comfort? Do we want a product predicting what we need best at a certain time and then alerting us of this need?

I recently read an article summarizing a Master Class by Neura co-founder Ori Shaashua, who spoke on how personal AI is revolutionizing user experiences of apps and devices. I have danced around the potential of AI, but this talk really helped shift my thinking back to the “long game”, that is, how will my design strategy today include AI in the future.

AI will change how product designers and businesses craft their user experience. Are designers considering AI in their longterm product strategy when creating for clients? Will the companies who do not include AI experiences inevitably fail? Below are some of the insights taken from HackingUI, to check out the full article and video please click on that link.

Case #1: Spotify

If Spotify had a personal AI agent that made it “user aware”, then it may know when you’re exercising at the gym, driving to work, or relaxing at home on a Friday night.

By now you might be saying to yourself “What? Spotify doesn’t know this by now?”, well, yeah — Spotify doesn’t know these things right now, at least not automatically.

If Spotify knows you’re exercising at the gym at a given moment, then it can automatically cue up an energetic playlist to motivate you during your workout. Or if you’re at home relaxing on a Friday night, it can suggest you turn on your “Chill Acoustic” playlist. In either case, Spotify proactively serves you, the end-user.

This is a concept only to illustrate an idea. This is NOT an actual notification from Spotify

Case #2: Lyft

Let’s say you work for a company that has an office in New York and San Francisco. When you visit the San Francisco office, you usually stay at a nearby hotel and spend most of your time working at the office. Lyft, in its current state, doesn’t know this.

With personal AI, Lyft would know this and could automatically make sure you have a car waiting for you every morning at the hotel to drive you to the office. Consider this: if Lyft proactively meets the ongoing needs of its end-users and Uber doesn’t, Lyft will win market share.

This is a concept only to illustrate an idea. This is NOT an actual notification from Lyft

Case #3: Amazon Echo

Amazon’s AI-driven, voice-activated speaker offers a wider range of services than other apps and devices. But it’s still a passive product. It waits for the end-user to tell it what to do, instead of proactively serving the end-user. A user-aware Amazon Echo could, for example, automatically activate your home security system as you’re going to bed. Or it could close your garage door for you if you forget to close it yourself as you’re rushing off to work, or Amazon Echo could automatically set your thermostat to a cool temperature if it knows you’re out jogging. In these examples, you the end-user don’t have to do anything except enjoy personalized service from your smart home device.

This is a concept only to illustrate an idea. This is NOT an actual notification from Alexa

Personal AI on the Internet has created rich experiences for consumers and yielded huge profits for Internet companies.

We can now expect similar results when we bring personal AI to the Outernet. But it’s not enough to expect… we need to:

1. Get familiar with the actual data points and technology that’s out there to make this possible
2. Start thinking AI when crafting UX

Stress and frustration could potentially cause a user to completely abandon a product which in turn could cost your company millions of dollars. Consider that the Apple’s iTunes App Store is home to over 1.5 million apps, and that 1 in 4 people abandon mobile apps after only one use, the race to engage and retain a user is ever present. Pressure from Stakeholders may point that the visuals of the app need improvement, or worse, that there aren’t enough of the correct features. Meanwhile, the core of user frustration and app abandonment could boil down to one design principle, cognitive load.

Cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort being used by the working memory. The working memory is where information is processed and storage is limited. Your brain begins to slow down or even abandon a task at hand when it receives more information than it can handle. Although cognitive load isn’t entirely avoidable, designers must strive to manage and accommodate these limits. Ultimately, a user will ditch your app if it wastes their time, causes stress, or is frankly difficult to use.

Use these 6 steps below to reduce cognitive load and aid your user’s in achieving their goals:

Add Elements That Only Help

Any element that isn’t helping the user achieve their goal is working against them because they must process it and store it in working memory. Avoiding excessive colors, imagery, or layouts that don’t add value is crucial. Don’t overdue simplicity though for the sake of simplicity, branding guidelines and experiences that evoke feeling are still important.

Stay Familiar, use Common Design Patterns

Like a good friend you haven’t seen in years, or your childhood home, the best feeling is familiarity. By leveraging common design patterns, when it makes sense, you are giving the user familiar elements which they already understand. The whole point is to reduce the amount of learning they need to do, thus enabling them to move right along and get closer to achieving their goal. An example could be the Add to bag button, or the Deliver Now/Schedule toggle on the right image, as seen below:

Make it Readable

Always be clear, we need to make our content readable. This means our typography must be aesthetically pleasing, appropriate for the content and easy to read. With mobile dominating how we view our content we must also design with mobile reading in mind, cut to the chase, define the purpose quickly, and allow the content to lead a user along their journey. By doing this, we can ensure there are as little distractions as possible for the user, which results in a better understanding of the content by the user.

If The Task is Unnecessary, Eliminate it

Take the time to perform UX research so you can properly anticipate what your user needs. Sometimes adding features may seem like the best idea to increase product satisfaction, yet in reality more features may mean more tasks and increases in cognitive load. Design which tasks your research deems necessary, then test your product over and over in a Lean cycle in order to create the best flow.

Less is More, Minimize Choices

As we know, our working memory is limited. When presented with too many choices, our cognitive load will increase due to decision paralysis. It is important that we minimize the choices the user must make at any given moment, especially in places such as navigation, forms, and drop-downs.

Use Iconography Wisely

Is that a filter button or a list button? What exactly is inside that hamburger menu (The great hamburger menu) and why do I need to know? “Iconography can potentially be hard to memorize and, contrary to intuition, can increase cognitive load by requiring mental processing to infer meaning or recognize. While universally understood icons work well (ie. print, close, play/pause, reply, tweet, share on Facebook), most are subject to the user’s understanding based on previous experience (in which there is no standard).”- Jon Yablonski Pair the power of iconography with text so a user can identify what a mysterious icon may mean.

With 1 in 4 people abandoning mobile apps after one use, the pressure to gain and retain users is ever present. Stake holders realize that a loss in engagement is money lost, and as designers, we are faced with the reality of creating an experience that people want to dive into day after day, every time. While creating the next best app is a full challenge, designers can focus on the steps mentioned above to reduce cognitive load and potentially increase engagement. Ultimately, design with the user’s goals in mind, test these designs, and test again. Help people win!

After a couple google searches, and some youtube videos on meditation, we ended our search at a promising guided mediation app that “Makes Meditation Simple”, called Headspace. Headspace provides:

• Hundreds of themed sessions on everything from stress to sleep
• Bite-sized meditations for busy schedules
• SOS exercises in case of sudden meltdowns

My father who knows pretty much nothing about meditation and has minimal knowledge of technology, first doubted the promises of this app but proceeded to download it and try it out. Fast forward 5 weeks later, my father, the lone-ranging, easily to anger elf, is now a practically changed man. An average dinner conversation entails him speaking to us of mindfulness tips and strategies “Watch your thoughts pass you like clouds” he says, through a mouthful of quinoa.

We were shocked that a mobile app would provide enough context to provide value to someone’s life. So much so that their actions and behaviors even change in a positive manner. It was amazing how much he enjoyed meditation, diving into about three Headspace lessons per day, exiting meditation as if the world was as fresh and new as a morning sunrise.

https://media.giphy.com/media/9WHE2bo5Na9Gg/giphy.gif

It goes back to the old saying:

“Give a man a fish, and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed a man for a lifetime”

“Too much of our products simply give people a fish instead of teaching them how to fish. That is, most products act as a dumb tool…can do a particular thing but doesn’t teach someone how to use it well. “ — 52 weeks of UX

But teaching is increasingly part of the deal…if you’re building products, you might consider how this product teaches people how to improve a certain aspect of their life. Give them some value, give them a reason to download your product and integrate into their daily routine. These are the products that will win today, not the ones that take away your time and distract you. Products should be designed so they not only provide the tool to do something simply, but actually teaches them a way to do it better.

Give value to your customers, design your product so that it assists people in elevating their lives. The products below are examples of such:

• iTunes — Stores your music for you in logical ways (by artist, album, etc)
• Salesforce — Organizes your sales process by specifying lead strength.
• Headspace — Teaches meditation and mindful living

But some apps take it step further, actually teaching you better ways to work. This is the software of the future.

• Mint — Teaches you how budgeting works and how to be better at saving money.
• Campaign Monitor — Teaches you how to be good at email marketing and designing emails
• Google Adwords — Teaches you how to run efficient ad campaigns

The products that will win in the years to come will be specifically designed to add some type of value to people’s lives. This is technologies purpose, people will expect nothing less.

The sun is at a quarter to sunset, your feet are firmly planted on a mat floating above the beach sand, you feel a light flow of cool ocean breeze dance through your hair. Your muscles delight in the stretch you are experiencing, however your mind is as relaxed as you with a margarita by a pool. You are in yoga.

The benefits to practicing yoga are endless, from mind, to body, and spirit, over time one has the potential to transform the entire self. It’s a beautiful practice, of which many yoga practitioners have been humbled by for years. Despite the humble beginnings, the yoga industry is now at large in the Western world, famous yogi’s on Instagram showing pictures of practicing in exotic locations, large companies with specific clothing for yogis, studios every couple square miles. You either know someone who practices or you yourself do. The data shows that yoga practitioners spent just about $5.8 billion on yoga classes in 2016 alone.

However impressive, yoga instructors still face a common problem. They wish to teach yoga with more flexibility. They want to teach according to their own schedule, with their own style, in various settings. A studio setting is a wonderful way to meet new yogis and build your brand, however it is really the only way for a yoga teacher to remain a full-time professional.

What if yoga teachers had a platform to become yoga entrepreneurs. A platform that allows a teacher to create a class at any public setting they see fit, disperse the class info to a large crowd of students, get paid for doing so, and allow to measure their financials over time.

An idea for such a platform came to me after hearing the same pain points from my yoga teacher friends. They wanted these things above but didn’t have a medium to do so. I created Youga to do so, to empower the instructor to teach as many people as they want, in any location, at any time.

As a UX designer I had to create something that catered to my demographic, yoga instructors. This app would also cater to yoga students, but for the sake of this project I am only focusing on the benefits toward an instructor. Two different platforms, think Lyft.

The challenge, build this product for my Ironhack UX/UI design program in under 14 days.

I followed a lean UX method, quickly learning about instructor pain points, crafting solutions, and testing these solutions until we had a flow that solved our problems.

Learn

In order to quickly identify pain points I used a couple lean methods such as surveys, interviews, user journey maps, and user personas.

From my surveys I learned that

• 60% wanted ability to set own schedule
• 40% would work for themselves if they had marketing help
• 40% also enjoyed working for a studio as it provided stability and the main way to build a brand currently.

Build

Once I identified that users wished to have a platform that helped market their classes, manage payments, and increase their audience size, I was able to then ideate on solutions.

I used crazy 8s, card sorting, low-fidelity wireframing, and testing, to ensure that I had solutions that could solve. The usability of this app was crucial since a teachers whole business would potentially operate inside of this app.

Once I had a wireframe that tested well I was able to create a style guide for my app. Choosing colors that would go well with the story of this app was indeed difficult. I decided to choose the gradient below, inspired by the Florida sunset, intended for a relaxing feel.

It’s funny, once I stopped thinking so hard about which colors and fonts to use I was able to discover the answers to which colors and fonts I should use. Just like yoga, once you let go the practice begins to open up to you.

At this point I began moving into mid wireframes and finally high-fidelity. I tested the hi-fi with a couple users to ensure usability. As a designer I am constantly reinforcing that visual design is only half the battle, if something is not useable to a point of solving someone’s problems then it is not a great product.

Below I have included my high-fidelity prototype via Marvel. I had a lot of fun working on this project since yoga has transformed my life in many positive ways. I especially loved the potential of this idea, a way for yoga teachers to help as many people as possible, yoga is a great practice and I recommend anyone to give it a chance.

Thank you and Namaste!