Focused
Building better productivity and empowering creators.
Deliverables
High Fidelity Prototype
New Interaction Flow
User Research
My Role
UX/UI Design
Wireframing
Project Management
Timeline: Capstone (16 Weeks)
Course: HCDE 492/493 @ UW
Tools: Figma, Photoshop & Miro
Team: Rajbir Singh, Christian Ramos, Michael Wentworth, Kevin Min
Company: Focused Inc.
The Goal:
Create lightweight social features to enable users to have a space so that they are held accountable for their goals with support from their peers.
Focused is a startup with the mission of helping users work toward reaching their personal and professional goals. Daily wake-up calls, community working sessions, and weekly planning sessions help users create a morning routine, structure their day, and stick to their goals. As of now, meetings take place on Google Meet, and communication with users is accomplished through email or text messages. Currently, focused is developing a companion application for their service and exploring ways to increase their user experience.
Design Question
How might we implement social features to increase engagement and accountability among users of focused’s application so that personal and professional goals can be accomplished?
Research
We conducted interviews with focused users and facilitators to gain insight into user experiences with the service and features that users would consider valuable in the development of the application. The interviews were conducted over Zoom, and were led by team members asking questions about user and facilitator experiences.
4 interviews were conducted, with 3 focused users and 1 focused facilitator. Using thematic analysis, we reviewed transcripts of the interviews and organized findings.
Personas
After concluding our research we were able to make a thematic analysis of the wants and needs of our users. By hearing about inefficiencies in the current system we wanted to address these pain points and design a sustainable system.
Findings
Importance of Accountability
Throughout our interviews, the most prevalent theme was accountability. The focused users and facilitators we spoke with repeatedly mentioned that when they share their goals and daily tasks, they are much more likely to accomplish them.
“When you tell a whole group of people [your plans], it just automatically makes you… want to make sure that you actually do it” -P1
When thinking about the focused application, we want our design decisions to revolve around increasing accountability amongst users, as this is one of the most important factors to their success.
Communication and
Connectivity
From our synthesized research, common pain points came in the form of having different time zones, balancing out social interaction from work and size of meetings.
“If I see somebody post something and I want to follow up with them, now I’m taking over the channel. And I want to be able to connect with people outside of the main channel” -P3
From both users being able to have a balance of impactful conversations and having a group that is more curated in interests can help community members become more connected and form community.
Design Process
Based on our interviews, personas, and findings, we came up with two design areas and design requirements we wanted to focus on:
Infomative User Profiles
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Having a system to add friends, customize personal profile
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Adding a biographies section along with, a status update and information about users.
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Having a reflection system for users to reflect over their week
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Making sure we honor our lightweight social feature promise, as too many features can be distracting.
Engaging Discussion Groups:
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Helping users find communities
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Using communities to help users find acquaintances who share similar goals
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Have the ability to set up meetings outside of normal meeting times to foster more engagement.
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These three requirements will allow communities to set boundaries and house rules to create a governed community focused.
Ideation + Co-Design Session
For this phase of our project, we held a co-design session with our team and focused users and facilitators. Participants for this session were recruited through focused’s daily calls with users and through the company Discord server
In this session, we began by introducing our two main areas of interest from our research findings; user profiles and community discussion groups. We then conducted two brainstorming activities with the participants on a Miro board.
The first activity asked participants to use sticky notes to list important features for each of these two design areas. Each participant then placed a star next to features that they liked or considered important.
The second activity asked participants to quickly create 8 sketches of potential profile and community discussion designs. Each sketch was created in one minute with four sketches for potential profile and four for community discussion. Each participant briefly shared their sketches and their thought process while creating them.
Findings
After the session was completed, we analyzed the results from the Miro board and organized the various ideas by importance for each of our two design areas.
User Profiles
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Picture & Name
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Status (online or offline) & maybe what meetings this person is attending - optional
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Answers to reflections questions - public visibility is optional
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Goals this person is trying to reach (big and small)
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Bio
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Background
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Contact info
Community Discussion Groups
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General group message features and information
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Ways to help a person who is stuck on a project like this brainstorming session
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Fun methods of encouragement and celebration
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Sharing goals
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ways to keep discussions on track
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Polls?
Prototyping
Following the ideation phase, we began designing the features of our application. We created both low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes that met most of our desired features. This process was completed using Figma. Below are the prototypes that we created.
Low Fidelity Prototype
High Fidelity Prototype
Final Design
The improved focused app is below, this video showcases the promotional material of our capstone project along with the interactions that have been designed.
Reflection
Points of Growth 🌱
Looking back on the work of the last 5 months, this project was overall a success. Working with a young startup with less than 10 employees was a challenge, but allowed the team to have a lot of freedom to explore new ideas and avenues with our designs.
Challenges 💪
Struggles with the project included recruiting users for interviews and co-design session. Specifically, it was difficult to get users to follow through after signing up for an interview. Further, the project was on a bit of a time crunch because of delays in our research phase, which impacted the amount of time available for prototyping. However, the team was able to complete our high-fidelity prototypes by the deadline and everything was successful.
For Next Time 🤔
While the capstone project is complete, the design of focused's application is not. Given more time, next steps with this project would include fully designing the other two screens of the navigation bar to match the design of our project. Following this, it would be crucial to get the prototype into the hands of users and gather feedback to make the application as usable as possible. It is likely that our designs would change a significant amount through this process. Finally, software development would begin on the newly designed application and features so that focused's users could begin using the new application.
Thank you for reading 👋