Growing Habits
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Growing Habits

Overview

Growing Habits is an AR mobile app that simulates a growing virtual house plant along with the process of habit-forming.

The project went through the design thinking process focusing on self-care and wellbeing. The final product of this project is an interactive prototype of the mobile application.

  • Team: 4 HCI students
  • Key contribution:
  • Concept ideation, Secondary review, Competitor analysis, User interview, Data analysis, Persona, Prototyping, Style guide

  • Timeline: 10 weeks
  • Tools: Figma, Axure, Miro, AirTable, Torch

Problem Area

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive disruption to most people’s daily lives and routines. Concerns around daily routine and mental health are high priority during these uncertain times. To adapt to this "new normal", people were trying all kinds of ways to bring some stability back to their everyday lives.

Goal

The goal of this project was to develop a simple habit tracking and reward-based application to support the stability of people's everyday lives. After learning more about the users' needs, we aimed to support users' wellbeing with plant growth that motivates and rewards them for forming healthy habits.

Users and Audience

  • Individuals who need to restore the stability of their daily lives
  • People who want to improve their well-being by forming healthy habits

Limitations

  • AR prototyping: finding and implementing an affordable approach to incorporating our AR component was a significant constraint throughout the project.
  • Participant recruitment: recruiting participants during the pandemic in a relatively short time frame may have led to a less-than-ideal-participant selection.

Design Process

We followed the design thinking process through Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test, while focusing on our core values of self-care and simplicity of design. Our methods include:

  • Competitor analysis
  • Literature review
  • User interviews
  • Persona
  • Information architecture testing
  • Usability testing
The design thinking process (
The design thinking process (source)

Empathize

Literature Review & Competitor Analysis

We conducted a literature review on topics around habit formation, including behavior psychology, cognitive psychology, and habit tracking.

We also analyzed other habit-tracking mobile applications on the market, including Fitbit, Plant Nanny, Headspace, and Productive.

Competitor analysis in AirTable
Competitor analysis in AirTable

User Interview

We talked with people who have used habit tracking apps before about their experience with them, their likes and dislikes around some existing popular products, and their expectations of habit tracking apps. After the interview, we had an affinity diagramming session to synthesize what we heard from our participants.

Affinity diagram of research findings in Miro
Affinity diagram of research findings in Miro

Define

Persona

The collected data from the research phase informed the attributes of our personas. We set up two personas that we referred to throughout the design process. The personas helped us understand who would be using the app and provided insights into their needs and goals.

Personas informed by the interview sessions.
Personas informed by the interview sessions.

Problem Statement

User An individual whose everyday routine was disrupted by the pandemic

Need The user needs to rebuild their routine and take care of their wellbeing by building healthy habits. The user needs to perform achievable tasks repeatedly to form a habit.
Insight The user would like to track their process with an engaging and motivating app. The user would not want to be pressured and judged by their performance.

We reiterated our problem statement and narrowed our direction after the research phase. To provide people with assistance to form healthy habits and routines, we sought to create an app that takes minimal effort to build up small steps towards a healthier life while supporting them with positive rewards.

Ideate

Based on our research findings and user feedback, we decided to design a habit tracking system that utilizes the metaphor of a growing plant to visually present the progress within the context of the user’s daily life. Our ideas for the initial design included:

  • AR house plant: An AR house plant is intriguing and engaging for the users, potentially encouraging them along the process and bringing rewards into their daily lives.
  • Onboarding survey: This provides the context of use and allows the user to set the desired time and frequency.
  • Journal feature: Journaling enables a reflective approach that could stimulate self-awareness.
  • Notifications: Offering suggestions, tips, and resources through notifications will serve as a source of motivation for the user.
  • Social sharing feature: This will motivate higher engagement with the new habit, potentially providing a sense of community.
  • Clean and simple visual design: We aim to provide an emotionally and aesthetically supportive environment for habit formation.

Prototype & Test

User Flow & Wireframes

We started our design process by developing a user flow and creating wireframes with the features mentioned above.

User flow and initial wireframes
User flow and initial wireframes

Lo-fi Prototype

After defining the user flow and high-level layouts, we built and tested our prototypes through iterations. We started with a lo-fi prototype in Axure to test for the overall structure and the navigation for key tasks.

Here's the Axshare Link to our lo-fi prototype.

Lo-fi prototype in Axure
Lo-fi prototype in Axure

Feedback & Findings

The results from the first round of usability testing and the Chalkmark testing indicated that our app was in the right direction while showing improvement opportunities.

Based on the feedback, we iterated on

  • Navigational flow: focusing on the key tasks needed to complete the primary goals
  • Onboarding: providing users with a suggested habits list in the onboarding screens
  • Features: simplifying our feature set for a more straightforward navigation flow
  • Content: using consistent messaging and language that users are already familiar with

Hi-fi Prototype

We incorporated the feedback and iterated on our prototype in Figma. While we narrowed down the app's complexity, we applied a style guide aiming for simplicity and accessibility of design to the prototype.

Here's the Figma link to our hi-fi prototype.

Hi-fi prototype in Figma
Hi-fi prototype in Figma

Feedback & Findings

Our second round of usability testing validated aspects of learnability and usability with an average score of 73 on the System Usability Scale (SUS). This was also supported by the qualitative feedback we received during follow-up questions of their ratings.

The feedback from our participants covered these areas:

  • Confidence in the perception of app learnability
  • Ease of use through the simplicity of design
  • Higher confidence in using the app than from previous iterations
  • SUS score calculation spreadsheet
    SUS score calculation spreadsheet

Future Directions

  • Improving the AR component in the prototype to create a more immersive experience. This will help draw out more accurate user feedback for future iterations.
  • Including different kinds of plants to represent the different levels of difficulties in habit formation. This could potentially strengthen the association between the habit and the plant.
  • Integrating tooltips: Integrating the instructions into the first-time-use so that it does not disrupt the user’s flow but informs them as they go.
  • Adding a long press: Increasing the investment in the plant by expanding the interaction duration to strengthen the association between plant growth and habit formation.

Key takeaway

This application introduced a new combination of habit formation and AR technology that was unfamiliar to the general population when we conducted the tests. We found the majority of our participants needed more explanation of what it is and how it works with the plant growth reward. This could be one of the reasons why we continued to see an association of mismatched mental models of habit formation with the reward of plant growth. The future directions above include some of our ideas to close this gap.

However, once our participants understood how the application works, they found it engaging and intriguing. Throughout the process, we aimed at striking a balance between providing meaningful positive reinforcement in habit formation and keeping the efficiency of simplicity. Overall, our research supported the potential of integrating AR technology into habit-forming applications to offer positive reinforcement within the user's context.

Take a look at my other projects here:

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LinkedIn: Gina Pan