Hakuna is a mobile app connecting young urban residents with their natural and built surroundings through short, fun challenges around the themes of nature exploration, city exploration, and mindfulness.
Hakuna
Timeframe
March 2021 (2 weeks)
Team
2 designers
Role
UI/UX designer
Scope
full design process, from user research to prototyping
Tools
Figma, Mural
Problem
HMW incentivize young, busy urban residents to spend more time outside?
For our final UI/UX design class project, we were asked to design a digital solution to help users connect with nature. Studies show that the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the already limited time many young, busy adults spend outside, impacting their physical and mental wellbeing. Recognizing this behavior in ourselves, we set out to find a digital solution to help young urban residents find the time and motivation to go outside.
Solution: Hakuna
An app that empowers urban residents to explore the outdoors through short challenges around their location, community building, and monitoring personal growth.
Feature #1: Outdoors Challenge
I was the primary designer of our app’s main feature, which allows the user to select a brief challenge from 3 main categories: nature exploration, city exploration, and outdoors meditation.
To account for users’ busy life-styles, all challenges have a timeframe of under 20 minutes. Example challenges include spotting common flora in the user’s area, discovering a new monument in their area, and taking a refreshing walk, guided by a brief meditation prompt. The pre-designed set of short challenges helps users set an enjoyable outdoorsy goal they would enjoy, the first step to going outside. Once the user completes the prompt of their choice, they finalize the challenge by taking a picture, which they can share with other users.
Feature #2: Building Community
We wanted to create a sense of community and allow users to keep up with their friends. The “Friends” feature allows users to view their friends’ most recent activity through ‘Activity Streaks’ and ‘Stories,’ which are similar to Instagram or Snapchat stories. If a location seems interesting, users can explore it via the “Map” feature.
Feature #3: Monitoring Personal Growth
To help the user keep track of their progress, we included stats as part of each user’s profile. This feature displays the user’s total activity in different categories on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis to help
MVP: Figma Prototype
Process
User & Market Research > Wireframing > UI & Prototyping > User Testing > Final MVP
The following sections discuss process and insights from the user research, wireframing, and user testing stages. You may also view Hakuna’s Figma page or the detailed report documenting the entire process.
User Research
We conducted 9 user interviews to define and understand our target population. We designed an app for sedentary users with insights from active interviewees who love the outdoors and integrate time outside into their lifestyles.
Core insights about our target, sedentary users and their bright-spot, active counterparts:
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These sets of interviews helped us define our problem statement and target user group. We interviewed 5 young and middle-aged urban residents living in Romania and Turkey and found the following insights:
Users put their study/work first and tend to neglect their physical and mental health.
Users stated they are too busy to go outside.
When they have free time, users prefer to relax indoors. These users don’t associate going outside with relaxation because of the perceived effort of going out (dressing up, leaving the comfort of their home, taking a shower afterwards etc.).
Some users said they indulge in sedentary habits despite knowing the benefits of leading an active life.
Users are more likely to go outside if prompted by someone else. They value their time with friends and enjoy spending social time outside.
Users feel motivated when prompted to do a task (going outside to do something concrete, such as walk to the store or go to university), but in the absence of incentives will not actively try to go outside.
Users spent less time outside during the pandemic.
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Our bright-spot users inspired our solution, as they prioritized spending time outdoors on a daily basis. We interviewed 4 adults under 30 in Romania and found the following insights:
Extreme users prioritize spending time outside and rank themselves as more active than most people they know.
Even when they are busy, extreme users find creative ways to integrate time outdoors in their schedules, like walking around during their lunch break or walking/biking instead of driving to work.
Extreme users perceive going outside in two main ways:
Alone-time to relax and recharge
Social time to have fun with their loved ones
Extreme users don’t see effort in the steps involved in going outside, like dressing up, facing the cold, or taking shower afterwards. Instead, they perceive the positive, exciting aspects of going outside.
Going outside is a habit for these users. Some extreme users were brought up to value time outdoors, others started valuing time outside after a certain eye-opening event like experiencing depression.
Extreme users spent more time during the pandemic.
Brainstorming & Wireframing
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The challenge format was an idea we came up with to get users excited to explore their surroundings, inspired by PokemonGo and Nike Running Club
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in order to integrate various interests without going too broad, our categories of challenges include nature exploration (inspired by iNaturalist apps), city exploration (inspired by the awareness that there is always more to discover in one’s city), and mindfulness (inspired by HeadSpace).
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Fit for a busy schedule: keeping duration to less than 20 minutes while still offering some flexibility allows users to fit their time outside in a hectic schedule.
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Tracking and visualizing progress is a feature employed by all apps trying to change user behavior.
We arrived at the following core characteristics for our app:
We arrived at our solution after many sessions of brainstorming involving creating “how-might-we” statements, mind maps, and sets of “crazy 8s.” Once we decided on the concept and main features of our app, we explored alternative UX flows and layouts through sketches and grayscales. The UX of our app is inspired by apps like PokemonGo, Nike Running Club, iNaturalist and HeadSpace.
User Testing
We conducted usability testing with 2 interviewees to following a semi-structured interview guide. We used insights from these interviews to create a final prototype.
Insight #1: Increase contrast and accessibility on Challenge Cards
Users commented that the challenge cards were too bland and sometimes illegible. We increased the font size and the contrast between components in our card by writing with white over dark-colored cards.
After
Before
Insight #2: Make nav bar stand out
The navigation bar did not stand out properly. The contrast between the navigation bar and the rest of the app, as well as between icons and the background of the navigation bar were too low. We decided to use a floating, rounded navigation bar with a white background which improved the overall style of our app.
Before
After
Insight #3: Clarify “Pressed” State of Homepage Buttons
When choosing a challenge, users are able to select the category and duration of their challenge. Users pointed out that the “pressed” state of a button was unclear. We initially used a drop shadow to make the category buttons look like call-to-action buttons, but the shadow was unclear to users. We added hover and pressed states for the category selection buttons, making the pressed button a darker color than the un-pressed button. For duration selection buttons, we replaced the shadow by a colorful blur.
Before
After
Stats Graph
To make the Stats graph more legible and less tiring to the eye, we reduced the saturation of the dashed lines.
Before
After
Conclusion & Next Steps
In 2 weeks time, we conducted need-finding, brainstorming, UX/UI design, prototyping, and user testing and arrived at our final design, which aims to incentivize young and busy urban citizens to their environments to go outside more and connect with their environment.
Due to time constraints, we could not include every function we originally planned, such as showing the challenge name on user stories and connecting it to its challenge card, so that another user viewing the story could directly navigate to the challenge card if they found it interesting. We would also like to conduct more user-testing, with target users and extreme users alike to identify further pain-points, bright spots, ways to improve flow within the app and generally make our app better. While most of the testing we conducted was qualitative, it would be useful to conduct quantitative user testing through methods like A/B testing. Finally, we would like to run more tests to check the accessibility of our prototype and make sure our app is inclusive.