October 15, 2018
I’ve been digging into the data I got from my user surveys and also taking into account some information I’ve gathered about chatting to people about this project.
I feel like most people I’ve talked to welcome the idea of an app to track your habits. During the chat people always mention that they have something they want to improve on in their life, or that it would be useful for them. These people have mostly been young adults aged around 25, but I’ve talked to people who are interested in the idea, who are as young as 19.
When talking to them the biggest concern for them, when they try to attempt to improve their routine without aid is that they lose motivation. One person said that this was because there’s no immediate reward, and a another said that it was because they find it hard to see any progress. This is great news, because these were the problems I initally seen myself, and these are the problems I’ll want to solve with the app.
Other people seen habits as a bad thing initially, and thought about issues like biting nails, or even smoking. When this was the case there was very different reasoning towards how a user would improve their routine. This was often because (with smoking being the most common bad habit) they were held back by addiction. In cases like nail biting they didn’t even realize they were doing it, which makes for a hard problem to solve.
While I do think my app could help to some extent by providing motivation to get out of a bad habit, or showing progress, I don’t want to focus on bad habits. Problems like addiction would, I believe, require a more focused solution aimed towards these issues.
Some people mentioned that they have found success using other apps such as “My Fitness Pal” which is geared towards weight loss and healthy eating - one of the most common “good habits” brought up. Because of this I need to consider compitition in areas like this too. One other person mentioned their fitbit tracks some of the stuff they would be interested in using this app for automatically, such as sleep habits.
A digital scrapbook by William Park. It contains details about my final project "Habeats" for my final project at Interaction Design Belfast.
This material is my submission for IXD501.