Year: 2022
Role: UX Designer
For: I created this project with Design Group 8 and Research Group 8 for the Mentor Me Collective Design Fellowship.
Technology Used: Google Fonts, Coolers, Paper Wireframing, Miro, Figma, Blush Design, Happy Hues, Iconify and Material Design Icons
Project Goal and Problem: During the Pandemic, young adults watched as their mental and physical health diminished. As the world opens up, our users want to regain their health and start a brand new journey to health and wellness.
The Humangotchi app was created as a way to get young minority adults back into a healthy lifestyle through gamification. The app, which features a customizable avatar, helps users get back on track and the path to health.
Research
While the research team did the bulk of the research, there were a few things that my design team worked on in the beginning of the project to get acquainted with the information before we brainstormed on the design of the prototype.
I created a user persona from the research team’s demographic research. I also worked on a competitive analysis report to send to the design group while we waited for the research teams competitive analysis and literary review.
The Initial Design
After both teams brought our competitive analysis information together, and we read some of the preliminary research that the research team completed, we started brainstorming by drawing some low fidelity wireframes.
We also had design team meetings where we discussed some of our ideas and tried to decide on which ideas made the most sense to us. Our team also brought our ideas to the research team in joint group meetings, so they could give us some feedback and also see what we were working on. Doing this allowed us to collaborate together.
User Testing
We completed a few lo-fi prototypes of some of the most important app features in Figma, and sent it off to the research team so that they could design a survey for us to conduct some user tests.
Challenges and Pain Points
Something that was a big challenge for us was that the design team was busy learning design topics and techniques from our design mentors, while the research team was learning how to do UX research from their mentors.
That didn’t leave us a lot of time to work and collaborate with each other. Each team had a team of five people in them who were very busy. Things were a little anxious because my design team wasn’t receiving enough research instruction, and there wasn’t enough time to conduct these user testing.
Even though we had to struggle to get everything together, both groups were able to work together to conduct our user tests. The research team took the time to do an extra meeting with us to show us how to conduct the user tests and my design team was able to conduct a few user tests of our own to give to the research team.
Hi-Fi Wireframing and Prototyping
After the first month of our design journey, the design team decided to split certain responsibilities between the members. I was responsible for the site map, the style guide, and design system. Throughout the process, I updated our site map in Miro as the app evolved from feedback from both the design and research teams, as well as feedback that we gained from meeting with our mentors from Microsoft.
A few weeks into August, when we first started the design fellowship, I learned that my mom had breast cancer in both breasts. I had to make a hard choice. Would I stay in the fellowship or leave to take care of my mother. She told me to stay in the fellowship, so I listened to her and stayed the course.
Because I knew that there would be times where I wouldn’t be available to my team, like the two weeks I took off to take care of my mother after her surgery, I decided that I would use my fashion and art industry knowledge and work on the user interface of the app.
My teammates Brittany and Brandon worked with me to create an aesthetically pleasing app that would appeal to our youthful demographic of adults from Gen Z. I worked with Brandon on choosing fun color palettes and typography by using tools like Happy Hues and Google Fonts.
Brittany and Brandon created high fidelity prototypes in Figma. I also worked with Brittany to create a sticker sheet or UI design kit in Figma for our app, so the other designers in the group could design quickly by finding all of the the UI elements in one place. Our app Humangotchi was inspired by the well-known Tamagotchi video game and Bitmoji characters. In Figma, Brandon built the character customizing components and avatars from scratch.
Final Designs and Conclusion
While there are some UX topics I wish I could have gotten to learn more about, I did learn how to work with people with different skill sets and personalities than me during a very difficult time.
Full App Preview
Thank you for checking out my case study and portfolio. You can also see the full slide deck that we presented at our final presentation here. Contact me at jaismarshall@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.