DESIGNING AN APP INTERFACE: LISTr
PROJECT: Design LISTr - a social app that promotes goal/list organization and motivation.
RESEARCH: Our research found that less than 10% of people keep their new years resolutions. This is a small number especially when considering these are major goals people are motivated to achieve. People have everything from weekly goals -like working out, reading the newspaper, or calling a relative - to bucket-list style goals that last a lifetime.
We interviewed users about goal maintenance and found that people often lack the motivation to keep up with goals but that, when they do complete a goal, they enjoy sharing their success with friends (posting on Facebook etc).
Additionally, we observed how people made lists - grocery lists, book lists, movies-to-watch, etc - and found a need for better organization. Our answer was an app in which people could create whatever kind of lists they desired and, if they chose to make them public, could share their goals and successes with peers.
DESIGN and TESTING: We brainstormed multiple variations of the LISTr interface in order to meet the most user needs while keeping a simple and clean design. We looked into current list oriented apps, spoke to potential users, and created paper prototypes in order to streamline the design. Slides were made with Adobe Illustrator and then placed into Conceptly - an online prototyping tool - to get a works-like prototype of the app.
In testing the preliminary design we filmed 8 users interacting with LISTr both freely roaming the site and completing tasks we assigned them. A short interview was conducted afterwards asking about potential improvements and whether or not users would use the app if available to them. Every user gave positive reviews of the app and feedback was used to improve the design further.
FINAL DESIGN: The final design allows for users to personalize their lists with images (with an umbrella image for the list as well as images for each of the list items). The app would connect to Facebook and Twitter so that users could comment or like list items of friends and post about accomplishments. We found people valued the "check mark" action of completing a task so we made sure they could mark off completed tasks and leave them on their lists. The app logo would fill in according to the ratio of completed tasks to total tasks on the lists.