UX iOS Project

Project Concept - Water, Bluetooth, Tracking Intake

How can we get people to drink the right amount of water? For our project concept, we decided to not only help people remember to drink water, but also track how much water they drink throughout the day. Our team wanted to develop an app that pairs with a Bluetooth water bottle to track fluid intake. Through iWater, you can create a specialized plan that helps you drink a sufficient amount of water according to your lifestyle. For our teams visual development plan, we decided to make this an Apple product and abide by the Human Interface Guidelines. We chose Apple as they already have established health centric products such as the Health App and have collaborated with fitness companies like the Nike+ App. Our concept fits in well with the health-centric ethos that Apple displays to their consumers.

User Research Synthesis - Interviews and Card Sorting

For our research, we started with interviewing people at a local Starbucks right across from a gym. The specific area is a health-conscious and active location, as our target audience for this app are people of all genders and ages who are conscious about their health and well-being. With that being said we interviewed five subjects that represented a wide age range of age and lifestyle. We asked them a series of questions that helped us gather both qualitative and quantitative data for our project. Through these questions, we were able to gain key insights about the issues around our problem space and focus on the right things to develop.
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Qualitative Insights: 80% of our user research test subjects knew how much water they should drink a day (2-Liters). However, 60% of our subjects admit they just simply forget how much water they drink throughout the day. When asked if there was an app that they could input the amount of water they drink in a day, 80% said that they would forget to input their data and would eventually delete the app. This meant that simply developing an app for which people could input their data wouldn’t be enough to keep users engaged. We also discovered the importance of reminding people to drink water would be a crucial part of the app development.

Quantitative Insights: 80% of our research subjects constantly think about their health and well-being. 60% of them exercise daily and gave themselves a 5 rating on the daily activity level scale. However, the other 40% who gave themselves an average of a 3 rating on the activity level scale are also health-conscious and think about their water intake. This means that we shouldn’t just center this app around athletes but include people who aren’t always active daily.

After conducting our interviews, we also had our test subjects go through a card sorting exercise. We gave our subjects a set of note cards that had features of the app we were creating, such as a social channel, daily goals, and 3rd party app sync options. We then had our users place the cards on a spectrum of importance. This helped us reinforced what our users were looking for in a water tracking app.

Prototype Persona

After our card sorting exercise, we developed 5 personas based on our participants to refer back to throughout the rest of the iWater project.

Competitive Analysis

Following our research and persona creation we looked at the top downloaded applications that were built around tracking water intake. Through this process, we discovered that these were all apps you had to subscribe to in order to get the full benefit of the product, also that none of these apps had a Bluetooth tracking water bottle to help track user's water intake. In doing this we learned about other water tracking apps that exist and discovered how we can differentiate iWater.

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Journey Map

The purpose of our user journey map is to list out all possible actions and screens that would take place in iWater. This is a necessary phase to understand how your app is going to work for not only first time users, but also returning users. It gave us an order and understanding of how iWater will function and be used.

Low Fidelity Designs

After developing our journey map, we decided to wire-frame three of our main screens. From our research, we decided to develop the profile page, Bluetooth connection, and intake/home screen. We did this in order to understand the layout and spacial relations of each element on the screen. We also had to consult the Apple Human Interface design guide to make sure we were within their branding guidelines.

Hi-Fidelity Designs

From our low fidelity screen designs, we created our high-fidelity designs. This stage was focused around typography, color treatment, and layout awareness. Having the Apple Human Interface design guide helped a lot in this phase. But it was still challenging to agree on a style and look within the team. We ultimately wanted something that was high contrast and simple for the user to use. We wanted our users to find this app easy to navigate and engaging. For our intake/home screen we wanted the theme to be based around a gradient that represents dryness to hydration, a visual for our users to see how much water they’ve taken in.

Retrospective

Whenever you’re finished designing a product, it’s always important to look back and see what you’ve learned and find key takeaways that you can implement on your next project.

The most challenging part of this project was the research portion. It can be intimidating going up to random strangers asking for a moment of their time. I found myself being rejected many times before I found people who we willing and excited to help. Practicing this helped me to overcome this fear of intimidation. Another challenging part of this project was knowing when we gathered enough information. I kept asking myself and my team if what we gathered is going to be enough? Are we going to be able to pull valuable information form this? Planning in advance really helped to relieve these concerns and questions that I was asking.

One of the biggest things I learned from this project was the use of a journey map. It’s easy to get excited after you synthesized your research and jump straight into prototyping. But creating a journey map helped me and my team stay focused with what we were developing. My team and I were constantly returning to our journey map to make sure we were on task and nothing was forgotten during our development. This is a crucial component when developing a digital product and is one of my favorite tools to use.

Overall, I feel this project was a huge success. We matched all of our research goals, enhanced the user experience, followed Apple’s brand guidelines, and created a solid digital product. This project was one of my favorites to work on, and I learned the value of user research. I plan to learn and implement new techniques to gather data moving forward.

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