Schedule your work breaks with the help of Eclipse, and gain mental clarity and increased productivity.
Role: UX/UI Designer
Duration: 9 days
Responsibilities: UX Research, UI Design, Prototyping, User Testing
Bootcamp project
Project Scope
The pressure of modern life, like work demands, financial worries and societal expectations, often contribute to the high levels of stress and anxiety and it is of paramount importance to prioritize stress management techniques.
This project, after conducting the interviews and trying to narrow our focus on a specific group of people, will be targeting individuals who face a lot of pressure and stress during their working hours.
Problem Statement
Our users are not placing themselves and their mental health as a top priority. As a result, not only they don’t feel good and relaxed, but their productivity is also lower.
Hypothesis
Our solution is based on an intention to revert the image above. This would be achieved by finding a way to help our users get reminded of the importance of taking breaks while working by doing their favorite activities.
These breaks would work proactively, preventing them from reaching a burnout state. As a consequence, stress levels would be lower and their productivity at work and everyday life would increase.
“74% of people have felt so stressed and overwhelmed and have been unable to cope”
That is why it is imperative as ux designers, that we do something about it.
Empathize
Secondary Research
As soon as we started working on the project, I decided to conduct a secondary research as there is already a lot of information regarding mental health and the effects of it to the human body and psychology. After gaining a better understanding of it, I started researching existing mental health applications, to understand which aspects of mental health are trying to cover and which methods and features they are providing.
These applications’ features range from providing relaxation, mindfulness and meditation exercises to tracking mood and behavioral symptoms in individuals with anxiety, depression and other mental health conditions.
While mental health apps can’t replace professional help, they may be a useful addition to your self-care routine, and help prevent certain conditions from worsening.
Survey
As mental health is a huge topic, we wanted to narrow down our focus. In order to achieve that, we prepared a survey asking questions such as: the frequency of their anxiety/stress, how they are dealing with it and with which techniques and if they have used an application to deal with it before.
The most important results are shown below:
Insights
User Interviews
Once we gathered the quantitative data, we wanted to dive more into it and understand better their emotions, which areas of their lives were affected the most and why they were choosing specific techniques to deal with stress over others. We conducted 17 interviews.
Some of the most important questions, that affected our definition stage and decisions were:
1. Are there specific triggers or factors that tend to contribute to your anxiety or stress? Are these situations related somehow?
2. How does anxiety affect your everyday life? Are there specific tasks or situations that become more challenging when you're feeling anxious?
3. How do you currently cope with feelings of anxiety or stress? How this (technique) helps you?
Insights
1. Socializing is beneficial for reducing anxiety.
2. People don’t listen to themselves until stress has an evident impact on their bodies.
3. Lack of external control increases anxiety.
4. Feeling realized helps us finding mental stability.
SME interview
We also had the opportunity to conduct an interview with a Subject Matter Expert, in this case with a nurse specialized in the mental health sector. We wanted to use this information to either add more information to our own insights or confirm our existing findings.
Insights
All of the patients have anxiety, depending on the mental health disorder, they manage it better or not as much.
Drastic life changes such as moving countries, work, changing partners are always the ones that produce the most anxiety.
There are 3 levels of anxiety: low, medium and high (needs to be addressed with professional help).
Define
User persona
To empathize better and understand the needs of our users on a deeper level, we created a user persona that reflects all the answers we obtained from our interviews.
User journey map
Lucía’s routine on a workday.
Opportunities
Lucía gets stressed and feels overwhelmed at work because of the big workload she has.
She does not manage to get on time to one of her favorite evening activities, because she had to work until late.
Problem statement
Lucía should prioritize herself and take care of her well-being because in that way she will feel better and also become more productive at work. In that way, she will feel realized and achieve a balance between work and personal life.
Ideate
The challenge
When we started ideating, we conducted a lot of rounds of pure brainstorming, the crazy 8s, good and bad ideas. As we were progressing and building upon existing ideas, we reached to a solution that had this concept:
It would be an application that Lucía could use whenever she had some free time during work, or even on her afternoons, and based on her energy levels and her available time, the application would suggest her some activities nearby her location that she could do (on her own or with company).
We conducted several concept testing on users, we took into account their feedback and everything until that point looked that it was working fine.
So what happened then that made us change our minds?
We realized that we had not been focusing on OUR user persona and HER personal needs and pain points.
Our solution was not adding value to Lucía´s life and the possibility of her using the application while being so stressed at work, was quite low.
Our solution
Having that in mind, and after hours of brainstorming, we reached to our final solution that, according to the concept testing that we had and the design critique, seemed to be a better fit for our user.
An application that helps Lucía plan her breaks at work, based on her schedule, in order to relax, refresh her mind and go back to work with more energy and a focused mind. During those breaks, she has the possibility to choose what type of activity fits her needs at that specific moment.
Low fidelity wireframes
Style guide
Moodboard
We decided to choose yellow as a color that represents productivity and energy but also blue, for a more relaxed and stable aspect.
Style guide
Final design
In order for the application to work, the user needs to give access to their screen time data, so that it can detect the hours they are working. Additionally they can also give access to their calendar if they want, in case they use it to write down their tasks at work.
Mobile
Watch
As a deliverable, we also had to design the same application for a desktop version. After thinking of the use of Eclipse, we decided that the watch was a better fit. It would be easier and more intuitive for someone to get notified through their watch and also more accurate data would be provided, regarding working and resting hours.
Learnings and next steps
Through this project, I realized how challenging it is to be working on a project regarding mental health and stress. I had to leave my personal beliefs and wants aside, and focus 100% on the users and their own needs, based on the research we conducted.
As a next step, I would want to measure the success of the product once it went into production (MVP) and more specifically the engagement metrics and retention rate. That would be useful because I would be able to investigate:
1. The frequency of visits to understand how actively users are using the product
2. If the users are satisfied with their experience and if they return to the product over time
Thank you for reading!