ToGeThere
Spontaneous social interactions through art and exercise
For the multidisciplinary IPD class at the University of Michigan, my student team designed and pitched a novel social fitness mobile app. Our product excelled at the capstone trade show and was awarded the $5,000 Murphy Prize by a panel of industry experts.
Client
Integrated Product Development (IPD) class
Roles
Lead UX Designer
Timeline
September - December 2020
Above: Final prototype, onboarding.
Above: Final prototype, creating and viewing artboards.
Above: Final prototype, adding an activity to an artboard.
Above: Final prototype, store check-out.
Context
A multidisciplinary semester-long project
Integrated Product Development (IPD) was an experiential 6-credit course at the University of Michigan that engaged teams of students in competitive product development over a full semester. My team consisted of 2 MBA students, 2 BFA (Fine Arts) students, and myself as the sole UX student.
At the beginning of the semester, all teams were given a shared challenge to solve:
Design a product-driven solution which addresses the problem of social isolation in pandemic conditions, by enabling increases in meaningful social engagement with other people.
Process
Understanding isolation in a pandemic
We began research and ideation with multiple activities such as mood boards, market research, literature review, mindmapping, and brainstorming. We also initiated remote interviews with residents of the StoryPoint Senior Living community as well as with friends and family members. As I had the most education and experience on UX research, I guided the team on the preparation and execution of most of these activities, particularly interviewing.
The above quote was quite impactful, and made us reassess our own personal emotions with living in the pandemic. This, coupled with a review of Bain & Company's value pyramid and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs led us to consider how we might focus on addressing higher-level human needs.
Above: Affinity diagram of research findings.
We came to the following conclusions:
Going wide and narrow
Hence, we chose to focus our product on spontaneity, connection, and creativity. Using sketches and storyboards, we generated multiple concepts within three major user needs:
Above: Concepts presented to respondents.
To test these concepts, I conducted user surveys and user interviews that gauged reception and collected feedback, while other team members led internal evaluations (our own judgments on feasibility, viability, and desirability). Ultimately, we selected the “Visualizer” concept as it scored well on audience reception, feasibility, and novelty.
The "Visualizer" concept was a social mobile-first app that allowed users to input completed activities and emotions. This data would be used to algorithmically generate art, which could be shared with one’s social network. Though it could conceptually apply to a wide range of activities, we decided to focus our scope to exercise and fitness data. We created a father-daughter persona pair to describe our target audience.
Above: Two primary personas.
Above: Preliminary sketches and storyboarding.
Above: Low-medium fidelity wireframes.
Above: User flow diagram.
Using our personas as an example, here’s a description of our main user flow:
Taylor, the user, is able to create a shared Artboard with another user such as Steven, her father. This Artboard hosts their shared fitness activities; when one of them completes an activity such as a run, the data from this run (e.g: distance, time, heart rate, elevation changes) is translated into artwork and added to the artboard. This addition sends a notification/invitation to the other user to add their own activity.
Other flows that were mocked up include the aforementioned onboarding flow, a flow for creating and viewing artboards, and a store flow (where users may preview and purchase physical products utilizing their artboards — our proposed monetization strategy).
Addressing feedback and adding polish
I primarily worked on user flows for the app and basic wireframes for major user tasks. Meanwhile, other team members worked on the technical details for how data might be translated into art, the product’s brand identity, and the visualizations themselves (which we began to call “patterns”, then “artboards”). As the concept and wireframes solidified, we conducted usability testing to gauge if we were on the right track.
We were not. Users found multiple issues with our initial designs.
We implemented the above changes, resulting in more positive feedback. Equipped with these improvements and a finalized brand identity (ToGeThere!), we elevated our wireframes to high fidelity. I led UI/UX design, while other team members took charge of branding, pricing, and artwork.
At the end of the semester, an online trade show was held. Members of the public were able to view the products created by the teams in this course and “buy” products they liked (with limited virtual money, as an allegory for voting). We presented ToGeThere through a product web page, a marketing video, and a high-fidelity prototype.
Outcomes
Learning to champion UX
Among 6 competing products, ToGeThere came in 1st in online sales quantity and unit profit margin as well as 2nd in total profit. ToGeThere also won the $5,000 Murphy Prize, a prize awarded to the best product of the course (as judged by a consulting panel of industry experts) to serve as seed money. The team declined the prize as we were not interested in taking this product to market at that time.
This was my first multidisciplinary project at the University of Michigan as a UX specialist, and I learned a lot from it:
One thing I wish we had additional time for was additional testing and iteration with the high fidelity prototype, so that we could squeeze in further usability improvements. Furthermore, it would've been beneficial to stress-test these ideas with an experienced software developer to identify parts of our proposed app that may be particularly unfeasible, and to learn how to prioritize development towards a Minimum Viable Product.