Celebrate your accomplishments with sticker albums!
"Go Get 'em", is a task manager with the purpose of encouraging people to complete their tasks while getting rewards and some fun.
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BACKGROUND
The use of social media has increased over the past decade and with that the depression rate among teenagers and adults, causing harm to their self-esteem, self-worth and their view on life. It has also developed addictive tendencies on people, further increased by the fear of missing out. In consequence teeangers and adults forget about their priorities and responsibilities, avoiding completing the most simple task in order to spend a few more minutes checking out their favorite social media.a
CHALLENGE
How might we encourage people to create healthier habits to complete their tasks, no matter how small, while also taking a break from social media to reflect on their accomplishments?
SOLUTION
A task manager app focusing on rewarding the efforts of the people using it in the form of stickers to place in a digital album, and increasing their likelihood of completing their tasks in order to earn more stickers and unlock even more albums.
ROLE
UX/UI Designer, solo project
TIMELINE
70 hours (2021)
TOOLS
Figma, Figjam, Descript, Zoom, Notion, GoogleDocs, paper and pen
SKILLS
User research, information architecture, interaction design, branding, wireframing, prototyping, testing
*Educational project as part of DesignLab’s UX Academy, this is a conceptual project not a real app. If you want to help me develop it, though, hit me up!
CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO
Researching social media and the negative connection that has with mental health
As we know, social media is here to stay and its usage has increased in the past couple of years, leading to addiction and serious health issues. What I wanted to uncover was how true these facts were. To do so, I started with a desk research, focusing on:
⟶ Discovering the connection between social media and self-worth.
⟶ Understanding the reasons social media is seen as damaging to mental health.
⟶ Defining the frequency of use of social media.
According to this research How Many People Use Social Media in 2021?↗︎ 4.48 billion people currently use social media worldwide, up more than double from 2.07 billion in 2015.
Not only that but the average time a person spends on social media a day is 2 hours 24 minutes; that means that if someone started using social media at 16 and kept on using it at 70, they would spend 5.7 years of their life on it.
Those numbers are quite large, yet what struck me most was learning more about the effects that social media can have on people. Some of these include:
Now this is what started to lead me to the idea of designing an MVP that celebrates the little wins (like finally being able to cook those tasty cookies even if they look awful), the accomplishments (like doing laundry) and the joys (a cat looking at us) that surround us. This would later change, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
SILVER LIGHTNING OF INSIGHTS
While some assumptions were made, it was important to gather insights from people who frequently used social media to know more about them and their accomplishments
My perspective at this point was that a great amount of social media users tend to forget about their own accomplishments. I decided to interview social media users to get to know more about their perspective on:
⟶ What brings joy to their lives.
⟶ Identify the pains and frustrations of social media usage.
⟶ Learn about the pains, goals, needs and motivations of people in their lives.
⟶ Determine how people celebrate their accomplishments, or if they even do so.
⟶ Learn how people take care of their mental health.
Extract of the most relevant insights from the interviews.
I talked with 8 participants from ages 21 to 40 with different backgrounds and locations.
Some of the questions I focused on were:
⟶ Tell me about an accomplishment you did today.
⟶ When you accomplish something, small or big, how important is it for you to share it with someone?
⟶ Tell me about something that doesn’t work out for you when using social media.
⟶ How do you take care of your mental health?
I was surprised that 7/8 participants believed they accomplished something, even if it was small, on the day of the interview. One of them mentioned doing the dishes.
This was insightful since I started to see a pattern that people believe they can accomplish small things during their day, furthermore, 5/8 participants are more private about sharing their accomplishments/wins or only share it to a small circle of people, that meant that they weren’t that interested in playing the game of publishing everything on their social media for the world to see. It was enough for them to do it for themselves.
PIVOTING & IDEATING A SOLUTION
It was time to explore a few solutions, having in time three things: positive space, task manager, and celebrating accomplishments
To start ideating a more concrete solution, I first wanted to focus on who I was designing for and what kind of journey they would take while visiting the future solution. What would they do? What would they think? What opportunities could we offer? And, what possible pain points would happen?
I followed the path of two possible users:
⟶ The grasshopper: Loves using social media, could spend the entire day just scrolling through funny posts of animals and food. However, they’re aware of how much time they waste and leave a lot of tasks incomplete. They want to start a new routine to get accountability to fulfill their goals.
⟶ The productive ninja: Enjoys going through social media, without the need to post much. Reading about the wins and seeing the curated feed of some people can feel overwhelming and bring negative thoughts and feelings. To take breaks, they write lists and tasks, but they want to have a better platform to do so.
RE-FRAMING THE PROBLEM
By using multiple tools, it was possible to focus on the main problem gathered from the insights to reach to the best solution
With the help of the old “how might we” ↗︎, an abstraction laddering ↗︎, a Lean Canvas ↗︎ and some Crazy 8’s, I was able to start fishing out the solution. Each of these tools were chosen with a purpose in mind. I needed the HMW to understand more about the users, the abstraction laddering helped me re-framed the problem and focus on what was most important for my users (in this case having a positive space to complete goals and celebrate them), lean canvas to define the business, and Crazy 8’s to explore solutions that would lead me to the best one.
Extract of the Crazy 8's, idea 1 and 2 were mixed to create the wireframes.
I thought of doing a journaling app, a positive place to write thoughts and feelings, however, it didn’t completely check all of the features it needed. Brainstorming, revising insights and trying out new ideas was what helped me pivot once again and get to the solution that would be implemented.
Go Get ‘em turned into wireframes to show the most important features that the app would have. This included the possibility to complete tasks and organize them like a usual task manager. The twist came with how it was possible to celebrate every time the person got to complete a task.
Main flow: creating a task and completing it to earn a reward.
This was the most important part of the app. While it would work as a task manager, the purpose of the app was to provide a positive environment to the people using it. It wasn’t just a place to list out tasks and cross them off when finished. It was a place that would celebrate your accomplishments by providing you with rewards, in order for you to feel empowered and motivated to continue completing tasks.
Secondary flow: placing the sticker in the correct spot of the album and learn more about the sticker.
The reward earned after each task was a sticker that could be later placed on the respective album. The more tasks a person completes, the more chances they get to be rewarded with a special sticker, or the “golden sticker”. Everytime they complete an album, they would unlock more to continue their collection.
MAKING SURE IT WORKS
Testing early and fast to be able to identify major pain points and areas of improvement, mostly these areas were around how to create a task and a list
My next goal was to uncover if the app was usable and people could interact the way I was expecting it to happen. I had 3 main objectives for the usability test that would be conducted:
- Identify possible pain points and areas of improvement.
- Understand how people interact with the app without guidance.
- Observe if people are able to complete every task successfully.
I recruited 6 participants to test out the mid-fidelity prototype. I chose to do it in this phase of the design as my intention was to find possible frustrations and pain points early in the design, to avoid unpleasant surprises along the way.
⟶ 6 participants from ages 25 to 31.
⟶ Participants tested 5 tasks, from adding a goal, creating a list and adding stickers to their albums.
⟶ 100% was the completion rate.
⟶ Each participant had an error-free rate from 90% to 99%.
⟶ 6/6 participants enjoyed the idea of getting incentives to do their tasks and get rewarded by that.
⟶ 6/6 participants liked the interaction when placing the stickers.
REDEFINING THE APP TO APPEAL THE AUDIENCE
Changes were made to the buttons to create tasks/lists and a more consistent language to guide the person throughout the app
Task / Creating list
⟶ Separate CTA to create a list and a task.
⟶ Consistency in language.
Earning sticker
⟶ Easier language to inform the sticker has to be placed manually.
⟶ Bigger size in the number of the sticker.
Album
⟶ A "+" is added to inform the sticker is interactive.
⟶ Size of the menu of the album was increased.
FINALIZING THE PROTOTYPE
The solution showed in the form of a retro and positive app that welcomes users to complete tasks while congratulating them every step of the way
After the revisions were done, the final prototype was finished while mixing it up with the UI and branding made beforehand. The most relevant words for the branding were: retro, familiar, fun, intuitive and welcoming.
Creating an account and the first task.
Placing sticker that was just rewarded, read the extra nuggets of info!
Creating a list, then a task inside the list and placing all the remaining stickers.
REFLECTIONS & NEXT STEPS
Bringing retro albums back to life
⟶ If this was a real project, it would be time to move on to the hand-off to the developer. As I used figma for this project, they would be able to see the needed information with the inspector and get the needed assets.
⟶ It was important to test the design early, that’s how many little things were solved in time and improved their experience.
⟶ We all need someone, or a little app, to remind us to be positive and motivate us to continue accomplishing our goals and little tasks. Little or big, our accomplishments are important, we are valid.
Shoutout to Kailey Li for always being there to help me brainstorm and focus on my insights. Without you this product would not have come to life!