During my bootcamp to learn UX/UI at Ironhack Paris, I had to create a digital solution in the wellness field. I decided to focus on tiredness at work.
In less than two weeks, my goal was to identify the problem regarding how to deal with tiredness at work & solve it. To do that, I used the Design Thinking Process.
When I began working on this project, there was no pre existing solution, I had to start from scratch & create one. There were few constrains: only create a digital solution & find a way to collect datas to give feedbacks to the users.
I was totally free to choose the device I wanted to develop the solution for. But I made my decision regarding the users I identified.
To better understand the situation & the target, I made some researches & gathered a lot of informations using different tools.
85% of mammals are taking several naps during the day according to the National Sleep Foundation — So why aren’t human allowed to do it??
A nap helps reduce stress & improve the immune system according the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
62% of french people have at least one type of sleep trouble (Source).
Only 12% of the companies are favorable towards napping at work (Opinion Way Study, June 2016).
This helped me understand better what was the situation & summed it up with the next tool. My first conclusion was that there was a big work to do to help things change!!
Perfect team work to nap!
The goal of this tool is to make some assumptions & give some surroundings to the topic you are working on. It is really useful to help you see where to begin with your researches.
For example, I knew at the beginning of the project that there was a taboo about napping at work in France. So the challenges I was facing was that a lot of people were suffering tiredness at work but dealing with that tiredness through a nap for example was taboo.
My aspiration was to create a solution helping workers admit they were suffering tiredness & overcome their fear to nap at work.
I then thought I had to focus on finding a way to meet bosses & employees expectations at the same time to get rid of that taboo. To do that, my guiding principle had to be a solution that would satisfied both improving wellness at work & work competences.
To do that I may have to focus on short activities that will not disturb the company’s routine & I should use some metrics to provide a real outcome for head department & teams.
Then I made a competitive analysis to learn more about the existing offers on the french market. I realized that there was a lot of solutions. But none of them were B2B digital solutions.
Either the employee had to buy by himself a physical or digital solution to nap (often really expensive), either the company had to dedicate a space in its office to install a napping area & pay for it.
My first question was: would it be possible to create a solution that would get rid of this two constrains?
And that is why my goal was to fill this gap in the market, providing a digital B2B solution.
Then I had to go further with the analysis of the potential users.
a survey with 100 answers: to validate some assumptions & help me see what infos I had to dig in.
five interviews: to go further on the points I identified with the survey & get more infos from people that could be my target.
After gathering all those infos, I had to sum them up & I began defining who was my target.
Affinity Diagram: A “post-it” tool to gather all the infos you have learned from your user research & sort them by categories. This helps you a lot to understand what area of the problem you should focus on.
Empathy Map: This tool helps you create your persona. With this canva, you can gather all the infos related to your typical user!
Persona: Then after using the Empathy Map comes your persona. It is your typical user, the one you are designing for! So your product should help him/her solve perfectly the problem he/she is facing!
User journey: After identifying Elsa, I had to make sure I knew when were the pain points she was dealing with & when could I find some opportunities to help her. That is why I created a user journey.
At first, I decided to focus on the lunch & afternoon opportunities because I had in mine that my goal was also to help managers & directors be more comfortable with napping for their employees so I had to focus first on work-times.
Crazy 8’s: This tool helps you generate many ideas in a few time (8 ideas in 8 minutes). I worked with two coworkers on this tool that I briefed on my topic. This way I could have 24 ideas & a fresh point of view.
A way to personalize your nap according to your goal: you can select a daily goal & the sophrologue voice & the nap atmosphere will adapt to help you improve creativity, efficiency, self-confidence or reduce stress!
Like Homer, I had to go step by step!
As I realized through my studies that my typical user was working in big companies or big startups but still, modern one such as Amazon (were my persona is working), I decided to first design for iOS devices. Why?
Because the people who answered to my studies were in majority iOS users. I also decided to create a mobile solution because it was easier for my users to go in a meeting room to take their nap with their phone rather than with their computer (not all of them have laptop at work)!
After that, I made my user flows to make sure the process was clear & Elsa would be comfortable using the app.
I had to design 3 user flows because the app needed to be use in 3 steps.
Second user flow: Elsa uses the app to do her nap & then gives her feedbacks. She also receives a notification to remember her where & when she is going to nap!
Third user flow: Elsa can look at her stats, those of her team & the all company. She can share them with some people in the company if she wants.
I tested my prototype on 5 persons & I learned that I had some things to improve. That is why it is so important to begin with a paper prototype: time is key, so don’t spent too much on a perfect version that will not fit your user needs!
Sometimes, you are so inside the project that you can miss some important things, that is why I was so glad to begin with a paper prototype & to share it with testers! They allowed me to see things that were not so efficient in my prototype & to improve them.
So I worked again on my userflows & my design and I made a mid-fidelity prototype with those improvements before jumping to the high-fidelity & the graphic design!
As I started from scratch, I also had to create the entire graphic design & the brand name.
I came up with the name “Nappy” because I wanted my solution to be friendly & clear.
Then I made a huge moodboard phase to define the style tile of the application. I made a collage of different images that I liked for the colors, the shapes, the meaning, etc.
It was a good exercise to express what I was thinking about without words & help me clear my choices.
But you may wonder why?
I used rounded shapes & flat design to give a friendly & clear aspect to my application.
Plants illustrations would help me express the idea of progress, wellness increase through napping.
Finally, to increase the friendly aspect of the app & make the users feel comfortable with the idea of napping, I used a rounded typo for the titles, rounded buttons & also emoticons to help them figuring out what emotions they are feeling.
Here you can see some examples of the screens I created for Nappy.
Now let’s dive into my prototype. I presented the three user flows with the call to action (notifications) that will help Elsa use the app. I grouped the second & third user flows into one video.
I was happy because my goal was to make a friendly & smooth design to make my users comfortable & make them feel great while napping.
Now, I would like to improve my micro-interactions in the animated prototype, making smoothers animations between the cards & more playful animations in the stats part.
I also would like to make more tests on the concept to go further with it.
Don’t Bind Your Soul to a Token. Yet.