Phosphenes was a web app I designed along with my teammates Ryan Yang and Raina Ahuja for an interaction design class.
Needfinding
We observed college students go about their days too see what problems they faced and the breakdowns they experienced while trying to do what they wanted to do. We noticed that many students took breaks while studying to do activities that relieved them of the stress they were feeling. Some spend their time watching videos, some play games, some exercise, some talk to their friends or use other forms of social media. Others like club activities or arts and crafts.
Point of View
"Everyone experiences stress but their individual outlets are different.
It would be helpful to release this stress in different ways, especially if the ways chosen were supported by others.''
It would be helpful to release this stress in different ways, especially if the ways chosen were supported by others.''
Storyboarding
We used low fidelity storyboards to illustrate our potential solutions to the design challenge.
We wanted to see how they would deliver satisfaction and assess their overall fit in the life of the user.
Prototyping
Outlts is a creative media sharing app targeted primarily at college students who like dealing with stress in creative ways such as writing, drawing, taking pictures, composing music, etc.
Through our app we want to encourage the creating, sharing and supporting of creative stress outlets.
Prototype 1
Shows how to navigate the app and contribute to different outlets.
Prototype 2
Shows the idea space where the users can view the contributions made by other users.
It also shows how the achievements of a user are tracked on their profile page.
It also shows how the achievements of a user are tracked on their profile page.
Heuristic Evaluations
We evaluated our paper prototypes using the wizard of oz technique.
To ensure that our users had a common vocabulary to provide feedback, we used Nielson's Heuristics for UI design.
Wireframes
Based on the results of our usability tests, we chose the best features of the two prototypes and created Wireframes using Balsamiq to guide the development of our web app.
Revisiting our Point of View
At this stage we realized that our core idea was centered on creativity, not stress.
We decided to revisit our point of view and focus on one creative outlet.
"Creativity is a skill that can be developed with practice and draws inspiration from the work of others and from everyday encounters."
Phosphenes
Born out of Outlts, Phosphenes is a web app that encourages creative thinking by providing users with 'quests' that prompt them to illustrate an idea or object.
We were inspired by people of all artistic levels who embark on monthly or yearly challenges to complete a new piece of art every day.
We wanted to encourage this expression of creativity by making it easy and fun to not only find what to draw or how to gain inspiration from other work, but also to share it and keep track of one's progress.
Unique Interactions
Provides users with 3 daily drawing quests, allows them to share their creations and gain inspiration the work of others.
The 3 quests encompass varying levels of concreteness - from objects to concepts - to appeal to the tastes of different people.
Tracking of how many quests the users have completed.
User Testing
We presented some college students with the task of exploring the app and completing one of the given quests.
As we observed them, several breakdowns became apparent.
For instance, participants were confused about whether they should draw on the app and about what to do on the newsfeed.
Participants also clicked on drawings in the feed and expected them to enlarge or provide more information.
Redesign
We decided to add a help section to ensure that the users were clear on what they could do on each page and what they can do with the app.
Popular apps and websites usually enlarge pictures that are clicked on. The users seemed to expect this of the pictures they saw on the feed and we decided to add it.
Quest title associated with upload for clarity.
Rename Achievement to streak.
Notify the user when a particular upload counts towards a streak.
Change 'Quests' to 'Daily Quests' to make the frequency clear.
A/B Testing
During our user testing we realized that users were not clicking on the quests first.
Hence, we decided to highlight the quests option on the menu to see whether it would draw the attention of the user and lead to more first clicks.
We used Google Analytics and presented 25 people with different versions of the menu - with and without the quests option highlighted.
After conducting a chi-squared test on the click data we found that the results were statistically insignificant. In other words, there was no significant difference between the number of clicks received by the quests page when the quests option was highlighted as opposed to when it was not. While this could change with data from more users, we decided to against highlighting the quests option.
Final Prototype Demo
