Overview
Unity is a watch app that was created in the final semester of my senior year. We wanted to create an app that was inclusive, appealed to all types of personalities, and was secure as well.
Role
User Research, Visual Design, Usability Testing, Prototyping, Pitching
Background:
⌚ As a team, we wanted to identify the issues that people have with their smart watches and as well as the smart watch apps that are integrated within smart watches. We wanted to create a watch that was also inclusive to all people, of all races, genders and ages. We wanted to create a platform that integrated easier communication for its users, an advanced and futuristic visual aspect and a high level of security for the users itself. We went through many stages of research and ideation to come up with our final prototype.
⏱ We decided that we needed to conduct different types of research. This included a heuristic evaluation, a lit review and researching our competitors that led us to creating our user personas.
👉 We decided that we needed to interview people that had knowledge of what a smart watch is and what they would want out of it. We wanted to interview people that were somewhat interested in futuristic technology. We also included questions that would give us insight or not if the user cared about social media, communication, technology and data privacy.
👉 Once we decided on our User Interview questions, we began our user interviews. The user interviews gave us much insight to what users that use smart watches regularly are really looking for in a smart watch. Once we completed our user interviews, we did an affinity mapping activity. This helped us pinpoint what we wanted to create with our smart watch prototype. This also helped us create our user persona's as well. We had categories such as, Desired Features, User Preferences, Tech experience level and so on.
👉 Creating our User Persona's also gave us a helpful insight to who our users are and how we can deliver a prototype to them accurately. We created two persona's that covered a large part of our user profiles and this helped us build our prototype.
🤳 Through the creation of an advanced smartwatch with futuristic capabilities, our team plans to address the need for better communication, easier socialization, and ease of access of personal information through our smartwatch that combines the multiple features of competitors in one easy to use interface.
👤 We created a list of Goal Directed Design Requirements that helped us collaborate together on what we needed to complete to deliver a prototype to our user that was in alignment with our user's goals. The list of requirements is essentially what our most important feature is.
👤 We created context scenarios to pinpoint our user's situations and how they may use our futuristic watch as well. Context scenarios helped us create better user flows within our prototype. Our users were also all very different, so this also gave us a great insight as to how we can create individual apps within the watch interface.
📱 Once we developed our user personas and context scenarios, we began to create our prototype. We first created a low fidelity prototype that essentially gave us an an insight to what the user flows will be and how we can better improve them before we moved on to creating a high fidelity prototype. We created a basic logo and start screen. We also integrated the home screen with settings, the friends screen, the weather scree, and the health database. We also created a user flow for the different pop up alerts that we're going to pop up with the prototype.
⌚ Once we developed our low-fidelity prototype, we created our high-fidelity prototype. We completed and collaborated with this on Figma. We created a vast number of different screens and user flows that were based off of our context scenarios and GDD requirements.
🖐 Once we created our high-fidelity prototype, we had our users test our prototype again. We wanted to refine what the initial user flow issues were before we finalized our prototype. We found simple visual issues that could be adjusted like different elements on screens that needed to be matched.
🖐 We also found that our users wanted to be able to view their music library, their messages and the possibility of having a face recognition screen on the watch interface itself. These refinements helped us produce our final prototype that we showcased at our capstone event.
⌚ Overall, we successfully created a prototype that pushed the limits of our user's needs. We wanted our users to feel inclusive when using our app, and also feel the futuristic aspect that we wanted the users to feel good about while also not being worried about their data and privacy. Our final prototype included so many user insights from all stages of our research.