Mobile Application Prototype

Software + Skills

  • Javascript
  • UX Design
  • User Research
  • Balsamiq
  • PDFjs

Team Members

  • Jun Kim
  • Calvin Todd
  • Luke Nam
  • Sarah Doss
  • Edward Leyva

Concept

Our team has developed a prototype for an app that encourages the user to develop positive habits. The app is titled "bitzz" and it works by gamifying task completion with a reward system. "bitzz" allows the users to create daily or weekly tasks and assigns points for its completion. A progress bar tracks the user's progress over the day or week depending on the task type. The app also has a social aspect by allowing the user to add friends and create groups. This app is designed for a smartphone.

Blitzz App Prototype

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Design Discussion

Our target demographic primarily consists of users who are well familiar with the use of mobile devices and applications. Therefore, we aimed to create an interface that users would find familiar based on their previous experiences. While designing our application prototypes, our team has strived to develop an intuitive, appealing, and easy-to-use interface. Touch-based navigational gestures that are commonplace in other apps, such as the "hamburger" menu present in myriad apps and tappable back/exit buttons,vwere found to be of special importance in creating a useful and usable interface. Jakob Nielsen's 10 heuristic design principles were used as a framework for our user interface design

Jakob Nielsen's 10 heuristic design principles

  1. Visibility of system status
  2. Match between system and the real world
  3. User control and freedom
  4. Error prevention
  5. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
  6. Consistency and standards
  7. Recognition rather than recall
  8. Flexibility and efficiency of use
  9. Aesthetic and minimalist design
  10. Help and Documentation

User Research

Based upon our feedback from our user research and empirical evaluations, we made several changes to our final prototype. We observed that participants in the empirical evaluation were unsure of how to navigate to specific screens despite their labels, so the fonts under home screen icons were changed to be more prominent increasing the visibility and readability of the home screen icons and their labels. During the empirical evaluation, we observed that users did not use the swipe function for the User Profile to complete the desired tasks on either the Home Page screen or Task Complete Screen. Although there were directions on both screens to explain the swipe navigation, the users appeared to be confused and did not make use of it. This is indicative of overcomplication and a lack of intuitiveness in design of this feature. Therefore, we have removed the swipe features altogether, as they are unnecessary and unintuitive; instead, users will simply tap icons that lead to the next screen. Our team's empirical and analytical evaluations provided us with key insights that allowed us to improve our prototype with design choices that are more aligned with user needs and expectations. Between user feedback and a close examination of Nielsen's ten heuristic principles for UI design, we were able to implement changes that should make our app more useful, usable, and appealing to our target audience.