Google Design Sprint

UX research

Google

Industry partner

Year

2020

Understand the problems of users of having the excessive smartphone usage and design a digital solution to help users pursuing Digital Wellbeing

Digital Wellbeing

Digital Wellbeing has recently been introduced thus, while the smartphone was established nearly 2 decades ago. This concept is still new to users.

Users are diverse and the wellbeing concept is subjective which is challenging to identify a consistent scale for users’ awareness of Digital Wellbeing.

Manufacturers introduce wellbeing features as a way to enhance the awareness of wellbeing while third party wellbeing apps may have mixed motivations. Therefore, this might create a gap in users' understanding of digital awareness, with the perception being driven by curiosity rather than self-consciousness.

Project is limited to 2 weeks of research and 1 sprint. Time limitation is challenging to us and will result in a smaller scale of research and findings which might cause some biases in the final result.

Sample Size bias

The number and diversity of research participants will not be to a volume at which we can confidently assume representation. As such we must be wary of the resulting findings due to sampling size bias.

Social desirability bias

We must be skeptical of self-reportage usage as estimates are likely to be intentionally lower than actual.

Personal Bias

Our assumptions might include our own personal biases and influence the research.

Bias

Challenge

This is a project supervised by Google about Digital Wellbeing. The main problem Google asked us to look into is how to bridge the awareness gap of Digital Wellbeing among Android smartphone users that prevents them from leading a balanced life with technology. Although Google advised us to focus specifically on Google Pixel smartphone users, we broadened the scope to include other brands and how they deal with healthy phone habits. This is to gain insights into the strategies and successes of competitors.

We were a team of five UX designers. Digital Wellbeing is a wide and complex topic, due to time limitations we shared the responsibilities of background research, interview and survey to ensure that we can collect as much insight as we can. Following that, I was mainly in charge of analysis of qualitative research and identified the patterns to support the following stages of defining. In the Design Sprint, we collaboratively worked according to the given structure of a Sprint.

All Projects

We began with making Assumptions according to the provided problem space. Following this, we conducted Secondary Research to broaden our understanding of Digital Wellbeing. After compiling our thoughts and findings, we decided to implement quantitative and qualitative research, through a Survey and Interview. We decided to skip Personas because our research space mainly focuses on behaviours and attitude instead of demographic.

Once the research was complete, we analyzed the results with Affinity Mapping to identify any patterns and journeys. Moreover, Competitor Analysis was conducted to help us learn from the existing Digital Wellbeing build-in features or apps on how they help users to achieve their Wellbeing goals.

Our research objectives

The barriers that are stopping users from pursuing wellbeing, and
The current level of awareness wellbeing an individual has.

UX strategy

After completing the secondary research, the team gathered to exchange our findings and then diverted again for Primary research steps. We targeted versatile users in the group of people aged above 15 years old with the average smartphone usage above 2 hours per day. We focused on two user types;

Users who were aware but were not motivated / users who do not care, and
Users who were not aware and wanted to be made aware.

The interview was conducted through the interviewing of 31 smartphone users including 22 Android users and 09 IOS users which is not a significant number over smartphone users but a good attempt of the whole team in 5 days planned for interview and surveys from preparing questions, recruiting to interviewing. Individually, I had 5 interviews (3 Android users and 2 IOS users).

We learned a lot from users

As part of our research in the wellbeing domain, we conducted a competitive study between Google, Apple, and Samsung. We analysed how these brands handle wellbeing and what features they offer for their users. Apart from the inbuilt wellbeing features, we looked into how wearables add value by tracking sleep, heart rate, blood pressure and exercise.

Competitor analysis

To begin the Design sprint workshop, we collaboratively needed to decide our How Might We question to be able to share and define the opportunities in the Sprint. The Affinity map was created of all HMW questions. Initially, we were overwhelmed by many problems and got confused to focus on one HMW. This is a normal problem of UX designers who tend to cover many problems at once but not good for a Sprint. In my personal opinion, I thought that in the Sprint, we should stay focused to address the right problem instead of going wide, thus I suggested my team to review the HMW and we dug deeper in HMWs. It was iterated and eventually defined

“How might we provide situational hints and prompts to users displaying bad habits?”

Put all the HMWs on the board

In parallel, the testing script was created. Through this testing, our objective is to understand what the behaviours and the emotions of our users were while they went through the new aspects of the Wellbeing feature.

We framed questions based on three key scenarios in this journey to the Wellbeing feature-

Users behaviour and reaction on seeing visual reminders on their lock screens
On receiving a friendly pop-up notification on exceeding their default screen time. Thus leading them to enter the Digital Wellbeing feature, Setting up their screen time goals/ choosing to go ahead with the default or disabling the entire feature.
Users’ insights about being able to customise visual reminders.

There were two types of users which we differentiated, are first time users and return users. We interviewed seven people, and the people were mixed users of Apple, Samsung, and Android.

Testing plan

Comments and confusion around the first design and process flow were taken from the interviews. This simple first stage presents misleading information, as while lock screen icons appear to have the largest number of comments, very few were of a constructive nature. After compiling all comments and confusions, we arranged them in an affinity map to identify areas and patterns from which we could take into the redesign. The affinity map enabled us to prioritise issues that concerned the largest number of users, as well as considering suggestions to interpret new user needs we had not considered in the first design sprint. Following the study from testing results, we moved on the changing process and utilised our time end of the day for few iterate testings.

Insights and iteration

Introducing Customisable Digital Wellbeing Reminder

Prototype link

We began with low-fidelity Wireframes on Figma to be able to bring up our idea to a visual design where we could reconsider and optimise our decided features and flows. Continue the Sprint on the third day with a Prototyping and Testing plan in parallel.

Key features

User can set up customised goals and set activities
The Google Pixel phone will come with a default build-in Wellbeing feature which users have the option to disable it
Users are reminded about their activities by a 5-sec reminder if they are engaged with their phones for too long. The reminder activity sticker is present on the lock screen and active screen.
This sticker has an inbuilt animation, which makes it appear at certain intervals and only appear when users intend to unlock their screen.
Based on the default or custom settings of the Wellbeing feature, the user is reminded in a friendly manner about there usage
A weekly and daily report is sent to the user, informing them about their phone usage
The users have the power to turn off Wellbeing feature if they wish to

Build and test

The Race Towards Digital Wellbeing: Issues and Opportunities by Alberto Monge Roffarello and Luigi De Russis. 2019. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300616

References

Once we identified the requirements and challenges, defining the project goals is the compass to begin our UX strategy, which following:

To create awareness of wellbeing tools
To help people adapt to a healthy lifestyle by familiarising them with wellbeing

Project goal

From the project brief and response from Google, we hypothesised that most of the smartphone users are not aware of Digital Wellbeing or well-being tools and build-in features in their phone. A list of assumptions was created based on this understanding. Following that, we divided task individually which each of us need to conduct Secondary research and gather the findings and insights for the converging stage of research.

To begin

The study of 42 selected apps on Google play with 1128 reviews

55% (619) positive reviews

37% (413) negative reviews

9% (96) neutral

The findings and insights of 38 interviews

Wellbeing apps can’t change how they perceive their problematic smartphone use and their self-regulation skills.
Users consider their problematic behaviours independently of their contextual situation.
Contemporary digital wellbeing apps are mainly designed to break existing habits, instead of developing new habits.
Through social learning, people can have a better awareness and can also be motivated to self-regulate

Google design sprint

Selected concept and features are

Situational pop-up message based on the behaviours studied from other apps on phone (calendar, time, weather,..) to help users make aware of excessive usage and suggest physical activities for alternatives.
Setting digital wellbeing goals.

MVP: we aim to understand the behaviours and emotional responses of users when the situational messages intervene their smartphone use leading them to discover Digital Wellbeing and make decisions of pursuing new healthy habits. Thus, we focused on validating the MVP with 3 main features including

Situational pop-up message/reminder
Setting goals
Tracking statistics of smartphone usage

The concept was involved during the following steps of designing and iteration

Winning Concept and MVP

To understand the awareness of Digital Wellbeing among the general public, we surveyed 53 smartphone users across a diverse age group. The objective was to understand their usage patterns, wellbeing awareness levels, the actions they have taken in their lives for wellbeing and how they would like to be informed.