Google: Digital Wellbeing Product Concept
Overview
A collaboration between Google and Victoria University of Wellington masters students focused on designing a product concept that helps users mitigate the effects of ubiquitous computing to their digital wellbeing.
The Google Design Challenge
"We’re surrounded by technology. Interactions with devices are increasingly without screens, and they are becoming less tangible and even more pervasive. In a world where technological devices are ubiquitous, how might we make a product that collectively improves digital wellbeing?"
Desired Customer Outcome
By using our app to manage and achieve digital wellbeing goals, users will feel like they have more control in their lives by regaining a balance between technology usage and personal welfare.
Project Timeline
The Team
This was a collaborative group project with five UX designers. We all brought different styles and skills into the project and complemented each other well.
My Role
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Background research on ubiquitous computing
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Facilitating a User Focus Group
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Conducting User Interviews
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Collaborative co-design; discussion & critique of low and high-fi prototypes, features, and product outcome
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Creating our user test plan & test script
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Conducting User Testing
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Client communication (Google rep)
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Creating our design process poster (see below - "Our Design Journey Towards Ora")
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Designing the team presentation slides and content
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Facilitating the design sprint and co-design workshop activities
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Contributing to all Design Sprint activities
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Delivering the final product presentation and representing the team to Google at the end of the project
Design Process
Part of our design brief included an infographic for our design process. This is the poster I created to represent our journey designing our digital wellbeing app concept. The project was challenging, so I chose a mountain climbing analogy and refined it to be on brand with our app.
Discovery
Prior to our Design Sprint, we conducted background research into several key areas related to Ubiquitous Computing and Digital Wellbeing, since these were new concepts to us. This helped ensure we were all on the same page as a team before starting the sprint.
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Our collaborative user research consisted of personas, a user focus group / workshop, and user interviews.
Design Sprint
Because our sprint was during the outbreak of the Covid-19, our entire design sprint was done remotely. This presented some interesting team challenges. Throughout the sprint we explored several different collaboration tools, but ultimately settled on working exclusively out of Figma for project work, and Zoom & Slack for voice and chat. These three tools worked well together for our team. I can imagine how certain activities in a design sprint would be much easier in person using a whiteboard, but we were still very effective as a team virtually.
"How might we?"
Because Ubiquitous Computing and Digital Wellbeing is such a broad and ambiguious topic, we started by going through an in depth "How Might We?" exercise to help us narrow our focus and frame our topic in a way that didn't offer a solution, but focused our creativity on a specific problem.
Once we had all our how might we questions documented, we created an affinity map to help group similar statements into topics.
We then conducted several rounds of voting to decide which statement we would focus on for this project:
"How might we prevent unintended overuse caused by a sense of obligation when surrounded by pervasive interconnected devices?"
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We continued to iterate on our how might we statement throughout the process as we learned more.
Sprint Goals
One week goals
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We can create a flow that allows users to set a usage goal for a specific category (i.e. social media) across devices and then compare that goal with their actual use to earn rewards.
The user can view a scoreboard, compare with friends and family, and learn about additional ways to achieve their goals.
Long Term goals
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We want to help people reduce their time spent on devices, manage their technology usage and educate them on existing digital wellbeing tools they can leverage to help them regain balance in their lives.
Concepts, Voting, & Flows
Sketch and Heat Map Vote
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Next, we each quickly prototyped or sketched out individual concepts, and conducted a heatmap vote that helped us identify features we all liked which we were than able to incorporate into our proposed solution later on.
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We selected this concept because it included Gamification, Social Sharing and App Use vs. Intended Use, which had had discussed earlier as a team. We also saw that it could easily incorporate ideas we liked from the other four concepts as well.
User Test Flow
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Next we created user test flows to help guide our prototype and features, and conducted another heatmap vote.
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Story Board
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After this, we created a story board that built off of the concept and the user test flow, but we didn't find this activity as useful as the others.
Low Fidelity Prototype & Wireframes
We all met virtually throughout the day for critique & ideation on prototype progress for the rest of the project, which ensured we were all influencing the design throughout. It was during this time I also helped put together to test plan.
Features
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Usage Goal Setting and Management
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Social Achievements
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Trends
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Extensive Onboarding
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Usage Notifications
User Testing
Test Plan
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I identified key test objectives and tasks related to specific features that we wanted to validate and defined our desired customer outcome.
Key testing objectives included:
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Intuitiveness of goal setting and management
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Social feature as motivation
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Trend usefulness
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Onboarding efficiency
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Notification frequency
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Copy tone
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Customer Outcome Success
Test Script
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Using our test plan as a guide, Wendy and I created a detailed 5 page test script to help ensure we were validating our test plan objectives.
Key areas included:
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Warm up - Introduction
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Onboarding
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Goal management
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Buddies and Journey
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Notifications
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Overall impression
User Testing Insights
We recruited users and facilitated user testing once the lo-fi prototype was ready. Key insights included:
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Users want efficient onboarding with flexible and clear goal categories
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Users need more clarity when setting usage goals
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Social sharing does NOT motivate users to improve their digital wellbeing
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Users want to see how their technology usage is trending over time
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Users want to view goal achievements in a meaningful and relevant way and are NOT motivated by badges
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Users don't mind usage notifications as long as they are timely and relevant to their goals
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Although two of our features (social sharing and badges) were not successful, and we ended up removing them altogether, we were then able to focus on enhancing areas of our app that users found valuable, such as clarity around goals and usage trends and metrics over time.
Feedback Prioritization
Proposed Solution
Due to NDA, the full Figma Prototype cannot be shared here. Partial screenshots of the product concept are shown below.
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We continued to iterate on our how might we statement throughout the process as we learned more.
Features
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Clear & Concise Onboarding
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Intuitive Goal Management
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Detailed Usage Breakdown & Digital Wellbeing Tips
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Weekly Trends & Milestones
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Personalised Goal Categories
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Flexible Notification Settings
Project Reflection
Overall this was an interesting but very challenging and ambiguous project with Google. I have worked in software delivery sprints previously, but this was my first 1 week Design Sprint. This approach was much faster paced than I was used to from a creative standpoint and I can definitely see the benefits of rapidly and collaboratively developing product concepts to see if they are worth pursuing further without spending too much time developing them.
I wonder if there might be opportunities to use AI or voice assistants to control screen time rather than using a mobile device to set limits and view progress and notifications? This might add to the problem in the end. It would be interesting to test that theory.