Life's Balance is focused on helping people improve their lives with the help of a life coach. It contains features to help track your mood, accomplish goals, learn life tips, and connect with a life coach.
Life is a blend of a number of elements from family to career and spirituality to romance just to name a few. Often these elements of our life oppose each other like work and family. Balance is the continual adjustments to opposing forces so that you may remain unmoved.
With the tools, this app provides you will be able to handle the opposing forces of life.
Life has a way of getting away from us even though we have the best of intentions and set reasonable goals. For many people, it is all too easy to flow from day to day without evaluating where they are in their life, where they want to be, and how to get there. It’s difficult to do this in one area of life let alone all areas of life.
People need an app that gives them access to information on how to create the life they want, track how they are doing, evaluated where things get hard and ask for help from an expert who has experience helping others improve their lives.
The first step when taking on a new project is to build my knowledge and find out how others have tried to solve this problem. For this project to gain an understanding, I conducted a competitor analysis on three different self-care apps.
I looked at successful direct competitors to learn what they were doing well and what could be improved upon. I looked at the company and their product to complete a SWOT analysis and an in-depth UX analysis.
All three of the apps featured used a familiar flashcard structure but varied in their presentation. Here are the main takeaways from the three apps as pros and cons.
The second step of the project was to gain a more intimate understanding of the potential users. To learn more about potential users for this project, I conducted several interviews and surveys to find out how people think and their attitudes.
I did a total of 4 interviews with three young adults in their 20's and 30's and interviewed one older adult in her 60s. For the survey, there were 21 participants who were all currently part of an extracurricular learning program and interested in personal development.
I gained insights into how most people handle their personal growth and what their attitudes around their life’s growth are.
The third step in this project, was to create user personas based on the research I had conducted. A user persona is a representation of the goals, pain points, and behaviors of the potential users of the app. I also created user journeys to think about how someone would work with the app.
The goal is to generate empathy for the people you are designing for. It is easier to keep a face, name, and a personal story in mind when designing than the details of the target audience.
For this project, I created two personas and user journeys based on the interview and survey results.
With the research and the user personas completed, the next step was to look at the information architecture for this project. This meant a task analysis to figure out the flow of the app and the surrounding navigational issues. How will Tyler be able to use this app to aid his career? How can Christina use this app to juggle all the responsibilities of being a working mom?
With all the steps figured out the user flow could be drawn out to see how Tyler or Christina would navigate through the app. This also helped solidify the different features that would be included in the first version of this app and created a site map.
The site map gives an idea of how the navigation throughout the whole app will function. How will users navigate to the different functions of the app? This is the type of question that the site map answers. For this app, the site map went through several iterations as each prototype was tested. The site map evolved again and again based on the results from the test and user feedback. Here are a few glimpses of the site map and how it evolved.
With an idea of the functions, user flows, and site map, the next step of this project was to bring the ideas to life in the tangible form of wireframes. Wireframes are two-dimensional illustrations of a screen's interface. Then these wireframes are improved upon and the details of each screen are figured out. Once they get to a functional point, they are linked together to create the prototype of Life’s Balance.
During the creation process, I sketched out several options for each screen and chose one to develop based on what Tyler and Christina.
With all the wireframes and a working prototype built, it was time to test it in front of live people to see how it worked. These usability tests would help me answer the following questions to have a better understanding of how to continue to improve this project. How would people interact with the app? How functional are the features? Would users be able to book a meeting with a life coach? With answers to these questions, I'd have the information to move forward with the designs.
I conducted a total of 6 usability tests. To my joy, everyone I had scheduled a usability test with showed up, prepared, and on time. However, the second participant was having trouble with her computer that day so I wasn’t able to get a recording of her screen as she went through the app. All of the other usability tests went without a hitch and provided invaluable feedback.
After conducting usability tests, I conducted several preference tests based on the feedback that I received. These preference tests help to determine small details on a specific screen.
With the feedback from the usability tests and preference tests, I worked on polishing the design. While working on the polished versions of the design I conducted several more tests to find out how people interpreted different designs. This helped determine specifics when it came to certain design elements like colors, fonts, images, navigation, and more. Once the design was polished I sent it to several other UX designers to get their feedback and insights on how it could be improved.
This process of polishing the designs is a never-ending process. The rule of thumb “done is better than perfect” comes to mind at this point. There can always be other versions of the app but at some point, it has to be finished and handed to engineers to be developed.
This project completed the objective, which was to provide people with the tools to help improve their lives and find balance. Life’s balance provides life coaches, mood tracking, life tips articles, and goal tracking to help users. It is flexible and simple enough to work for several situations and people.
I learned so much going through the process of building this app. My design skills improved immensely. I improved my iterative process to continually get feedback and make changes based on the feedback. At times it was hard not to take the feedback personally but when I took a step back I could see how it would improve the designs. As well as taking a step back, it helped to test more frequently to not get so entrenched in one aspect or idea.
The next step for this app would be to finalize the goal function of the app. It currently works but isn’t as smooth and functional as it could be. This would be several iterations, tests, and refinements to the design. Another feature that would provide benefit to users would be to create micro-animations to help encourage users and to provide additional motivation as they use the app. An app the does this well is Duolingo and the micro-animations keep users motivated and consistent. Since these were two issues that were mentioned in interviews and surveys this would be another future step for the next version of this app.
