The Soaring Penguin Project - Viable App
The Viable App is a a tool to facilitate achievable daily planning and get important things done.
What I did: UX Research, from product conceptualisation to design strategy, UI design and product designer”
Duration: 1 month, part time
Objective: Finding business opportunities in an already crowded space
Research
Understanding the challenge
If you’ve ever underestimated how much time you would need to complete a project that you’re working on or to finish packing before going on a long trip, then you have been subjected to the planning fallacy.
When we think that we have more than enough time to finish assignments or projects, we tend to procrastinate and also take on more things to be done. Then the vicious cycle repeats itself.
The core challenge was “to streamline the process of personal daily planning for busy people who are subject to the planning fallacy”.
RESEARCH
Does the issue actually exist and is it worth solving? Who are the potential early adopters?
To find answers, I sent out an online survey.
What are their existing mental models? What are the go-to solutions and why?
I conducted one-on-one interviews with nine potential early adopters to gain an understanding of the problem.
Up to this point, I had relied on the participants to self evaluate their own level of how organised they thought they are.
To minimise biases, I also designed a contextual inquiry exercise to gauge how participants will perform during real world scenarios.
Why do existing solutions have unsatisfactory outcomes?
I analysed the existing solutions used in practice and their respective user feedback in order to understand what had already been done and whether it had been effective or futile.
DEFINE
All the data that had been gathered showed that many of the participants did have a problem with the planning fallacy. However not all of them were bothered by it. Some people were able to just go with the flow while many others had different ways of counteracting it using various methods.
At first, I could identify the issue but not the design rationale, so, I interviewed more people. This is when the two strong patterns emerged, characteristics of the two different type of people – the highly organised (HO) vs the poorly organised (PO).
Following on from that discovery, I created another affinity mapping to reveal insights between the two groups. What I discovered was astonishing. The HO group had a better system in place to combat the planning fallacy. Moreover, their system was also supported by expert advice (eg. Behavioural psychologists and researchers).
The results also led to more design opportunities. By modeling the way that HO people behaved and the systems that experts recommend, anyone can mitigate the effects of the planning fallacy.
I then identified two personas who would benefit from the solution the most.
The tale of Penny and the ‘Viable’ app.
I picked Penny as my primary focus because she is likely to have a steeper learning curve for the app than Leo, who already has a similar system in place. The learning gained from her is also more valuable for the MVP development.
My next step was to tell a story of how my personas were currently carrying out their tasks. I wanted to show, not tell, the snowball effect that the planning fallacy had in aggravating Penny’s pain points.
DESIGN
What is the MVP from a design thinking point of view?
To find out, I conducted a workshop by interviewing a Penny user and also making him vote on the story cards.
Each of the story cards was linked to specific solutions which in turn determined which features to prioritise.
Upon entering the design phase, I mentally laid out everything I had collected so far – the personas, their pain points and their psychological profiles. I worked out some earlier concepts in combination with a co-design workshop with a Penny user.
The outcome was a combined system of integrated tools that would work together in a mobile app which I called “Viable”. I could not help but showcase the solution as a new chapter of Penny’s life.
ITERATE
The biggest challenge was to turn a complex system into a streamlined experience. We are talking about an app that influences huge behavioural changes. There will always be friction and it will take some time to see immediate results.
My subsequent focus was to minimise the learning curve and to increase the short term joy factor to encourage users to stick with the app.
I used rapid prototyping tools, pen, paper and the Marvel app, to obtain some heuristic feedback through a structured testing script. Users did not have any issues completing their assigned tasks but they did find that many elements in the earlier versions did not match their mental model. I would iterate quickly before moving towards creating the low-fi prototypes on Sketch.
I also talked to some machine learning engineers to verify the technical feasibility of the app.
After the 3 major iterations, Viable arrived in version 3.0. The feedback of the app in general from both Penny and Leo users was positive. With a 93.3% success rate during tests and a 4 out of 5 average rating, I can now say the solution has a reassuring outlook!
That’s it for now. Stay tuned for the next phase: the UI design.
Planning Fallacy Definition
Quantitative data
Qualitative Data
Primary & Secondary Persona
Penny’s story – Pain points