My Work
MyFitnessStory
Ever wondered what's holding us to achieve the right fitness levels?
A case study to understand what's holding people to become fit.
SketchNote
Why is entrepreneurship or building a startup so hard?
How a one week design sprint helped in creating a solution for the problem.
MyFitnessStory
Problem
Insufficient physical activity is one of the 10 leading risk factors for global mortality- WHO
What is holding us to become fit?
Approach
Took a human-centred design approach i.e. Design Thinking for understanding and attempting to solve the problem.
My Role
My role was to drive the case study by recruiting participants, scheduling interviews, defining problem statement, ideating, presenting the prototyped solution to users and evaluating feedback.
UX Projects or Design thinking do not follow a linear methodology, but for the purpose of this case study, I am describing the work done during different phases in a linear structure below.
Empathy
To gain empathy about users I took the approach of mixing structured and unstructured interview. For gaining deeper understanding I used generative technique i.e. context mapping, it helped me understand the day to day life of users.
Design Process In Action :
Deliverables
To empathise with users developed following Persona:
Define
Analysis and synthesis of information gathered to create a human centred problem definition.
Design Process In Action :
Affinity Diagram
All the data collected during interviews, photographs and probes organized into major themes to create Affinity Diagram.
Empathy Map
360Created an Empathy Map of whats users said, did, thought and felt.
User Needs
Using empathy map created user needs.
Point of View
Users point of view
Deliverables
Making point of view actionable by constructing "How Might We" questions.
How might we help a mother to swap task within there family?
How might we help a busy person outsource there task to create more time for exercise?
How might we help a working mother to find a partner to exercise with?
How might we help people exercise during office hours?
Ideate
Generating ideas to solve the problem and selecting the best idea to prototype with. Utilized Worst Possible Idea and Challenge your assumption to generate ideas :
Design Process In Action :
Worst Possible Idea
A fun filled exercise
Turn Bad Ideas to Good One
Reverse the perspective to create new Ideas.
List assumptions
Create a list of assumptions about the problem
Challenge your assumption
Challenging assumptions by asking "What if" questions.
Turning Challenges to Ideas
Finding ways to make challenge a reality
Deliverables
Utilized Six Thinking Hats technique to select potential ideas to prototype with
Share real life stories of how people became fit in difficult circumstances.
Selected this idea for Prototyping
A Virtual Assistant to help them in staying fit.
Prototype
Selecting and developing one of the ideas as a prototype. Developing a storyboard to flesh our how users are going to experience the product.
Deliverables
Storyboard
Paper Prototype
User Flows
Defining major user flows.
Low Fidelity Prototype
Test
Going back to users showing them storyboard and prototype, and capturing results
Deliverables
Conclusion
The challenge of this case study was to understand whats going on
in minds of busy people preventing them to exercise. By carrying
out user research I was able to gain depth of problem statement.
The potential idea which can solve the problem has gained traction
to users because they felt there is someone who can understand them.
One of the challenges in building this kind of app is content creation,
there should exist a sufficient amount of stories which can motivate users.
This will be work in progress as I continue to build a high fidelity prototype
and gain more feedback.
During this case study, I learned how to recruit users, creating problem definition, applying
ideation techniques and doing usability testing.
SketchNote
Problem
Why is becoming an entrepreneur so hard? What is the path? Is there a right education for it?
With so much information available on startups and entrepreneurship still this skill is hard to learn.
Approach
Followed Google Design Sprint, a five day process for designing the solution for problem, prototyping and testing ideas.
My Role
- Member of Sprint team
- During the course of sprint participated in various brainstorming activities like "How Might We", "Sketching" and "Prototyping".
- Prototyping
- Worked with team to create a paper based prototype.
- Interviewing
- Interviewing customer on final day with a interactive prototype.
Prototype
Conclusion
This was my first design thinking exercise. We were able to put up a solution to the problem in a week time. The response to prototype was mixed. Some entrepreneurs liked it and some were not in favor of it. The content we prepared in design sprint was narrow. More design sprints will be conducted to further evolve the idea and prototype.
