💚 Empathize
After conducting User Research, we found that a problem that most users faced was how they would feel discouraged after failing to keep up the habit only once. Of the users we interviewed:
admitted that they completely scrap a daily habit that's been forming over the past months when they miss it for just a day.
found it hard to keep up with their habits because they can't visualize how well they are doing.
Just like plants that don't die when we forget to water them one day, or maybe one week, habits follow the same analogy! This is why we have decided to visualize the growth and reward of habits through plants.
And created from here on was the first version of Habitat, HonestHabits.
🔍 Define
Now that we had a problem-solution set, we proceeded to define who our target group was. We started by defining 3 personas, then dove deeper into some of these personas with 2 scenarios, and 1 storyboard.
scenarios
👩🎓 Tami, College Student
Tami is a high-achieving third-year college student majoring in biology. She’s constantly busy with homework and club meetings, and has little time to focus on self-development and her personal goals. She tries to use a planner with a to-do list to keep her on track, but she’s found that simply writing things down doesn’t help -- they are too easy to ignore.
Tami downloaded HonestHabits on her phone to see if making her goals more active will help keep her on track. Some of these include playing more guitar, reading more, keeping her apartment more tidy, and staying more in contact with her family back at home. She’s inputted all of her goals and is finding it a bit easier to hold herself accountable because she has a plant to keep “alive” and would like to continue to have more. HonestHabits helps her because it breaks her larger goals down into smaller ones. For example, she’s able to break down “play more guitar” into “play guitar for 20 minutes three times a week” and set time blocks for push notifications, which makes these tasks less avoidable.
A few months have gone by, and Tami has been significantly more successful in staying on track with her goals. The personalized push notifications and excellent graphics help keep Tami coming back to HonestHabits to complete more of her goals. Tami has successfully found time to reconnect with herself and her hobbies.
"Shania is a recently-remarried mom with a 5 year old son. She currently works at Nordstrom, running in-store sales. With this, she has very little time to focus on personal growth and goals, and usually brushes them to the side. But she doesn’t want to work at Nordstrom for the rest of her life. She dreams of being a great writer, and wishes she was more mindful. Shania therefore has a problem: She wants to keep up with her personal goals while maintaining her work and family life.
Shania downloaded HonestHabits on her phone and started breaking down her goals into small, daily tasks that she could complete. Instead of just hoping one day she will magically achieve her dreams, she’s now writing 500 words and meditating for 10 minutes daily. She is motivated to do these daily tasks as her “Habit Plants” started to grow. In addition, she gets daily reminders to complete the tasks before she goes to sleep. Even though she still chooses to neglect these habits on some days, her plant does not ‘die’. As long as she keeps her habits consistent in the next following days, her plant will continue to grow.
After using HonestHabits, Shania feels that she has more control over her life. Instead of spending her whole day fulfilling the needs of others, she has now built up habits for her own personal growth."
Storyboard
👩💻 Shania's Storyboard
🧠 Ideate
And here's the crazy fun part: generating a range of creative ideas that may even be out of this world. In this phase, we came up with a total of 4 Visual Value Propositions, or a simple statement of why a customer would choose our production. Then, we started planning a Sitemap and the UI Progression of how our app would pan out to users.
Visual value propositions
site map & user interface progression
Before constructing our site map, we must figure out which features will be included in the prototype. Features arise as a result of a user's need. As a result, we wrote over 40 different epics using the format:
"As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>"
These goals were then ranked in order from most to least common, then ranked by importance. Hereafter, features were carefully picked to meet each of the following goals.
Then, we had to clearly define what 🏃 Goal, 🌱 Habit, and 🗒 Task meant so that we could categorize them properly. Here's what we came up with:
🏃 Goal: The overarching objective that you want to change about yourself
🌱 Habit: Manifestation of doing the tasks consistently, very similar to Goal
🗒 Task: Actual execution of the habit, the daily/three times a week thing you do
🔨 Prototype
Before we start building, we created a Design System to make things easier during our build. We've specified the app's Typography, Icons, Branding, Colors, Assets, and Components in the Design System, so that we can pretty much drag and drop them into our prototype keeping things simple, as well as central.
... And now we ✨ build ✨!
design system
📊 Test
Just as important as the prototype itself is the potential users' 🗣 feedback on our prototype.
We made sure to show the Habitat's VVP and a walkthrough of the prototype using a User Story of Jenna, a third-year college student who is looking to find a work-life balance.
After the demo, we make sure to follow up by asking the same questions for every epic goals we found most important, separated into 2 use cases. These were the sections and questions:
Use Cases
1) As a user, I want to use the growth of a plant to represent my progress towards my goal.
2) As a business man, I want to see how fast my co-workers are achieving their habits by watching their garden grow
Goals
Setting up plant / onboarding process 📝
Social aspect 👯
Questions
🌱 What do you think this interface will let you do?
🌱 What do you think will happen if you touch "PLANT" button?
🌱 What would you touch to set up the times / frequency of notifications?
🌱 Please give me three pieces of advice for how to better communicate what this product is / does.
🌱 What would you want this product to do?
We also make sure to get plenty of advices from non-target users from our Guerrilla Tests!
📱 Implementation
It's been a loonggggggg ride, but we finally made it! After multiple pivots and reiteration we've implemented all of the users' feedbacks into our ✨ final ✨ prototype!
... And we present to you 🌱 Habitat.
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