inspired by our own experience of studying as collage students, I took initiative suggesting my whole team to look up relevant research materials on how sedentary behavior affects mental and physical health of college students.
Yes, it’s clear that college students can experience mental and physical stress while involved in sedentary studying sessions, but in what particular forms those stress manifest?
In supplementary to our online research, we also sent out to observe people’s sedentary study behavior in the real world. we conducted 7 observation sessions in on-campus as well as off-campus locations, with each session lasting at least 30 mins. We were interested in the signs of physical and mental distress students were displaying.
After two rounds of user research, we decided to narrow down the target user group to students who study in Geisel, the main library in our college in order to come up with a more specified solution space for the user problem later in the design process.
To further back up and explore the pain points experienced by real potential users, we applied Gorilla method to conducted 11 in-depth user interviews on the second floor of Geisel library. I created the first draft of interview guide and actively conversed with my team-mates to revise it.
This step of design process significantly helped us to emphasize with the potential target users for our kiosk.
based on what interviewees said about their studying experience and how they relate to our storyboards, we condensed typical user motivations and pain points into several user personas.
(I made the first 2 personas)
IDEATE
User Storyboards
after we identify the design problem and target user group we want to solve, we came up with several storyboards where we imagine how our kiosk might help college students to relieve their mental and physical stress.
IDEATE
Storyboard Interview
we conducted 5 storyboard interviews with 5 students who usually spend a lot of time studying in Geisel. We wanted to see if our envisioned solutions actually make sense in terms of helping college students de-stress.
interviewees strongly related to all storyboard scenarios, indicating that muscle tension, sleepiness, and hunger are typical kind of stresses students put up with while they are studying in Geisel. They also positively reacted to our kiosk concepts in addressing those problems, and suggested specific products to include for the kiosk.
DESIGN
mid-fi prototype (physical)
Seeing how our initial concepts of solutions are validated, we then discussed about how specifically we could design our physical kiosk. Since I was the person most experienced with applying 3D perspective in hand-drawings, I made 3 drafts each of which documenting a mid-fi prototype vision.
eventually we agreed to adopt the idea conveyed in sketch 3 which integrated the solutions regarding muscle stress, sleepiness, and hunger into 1 multi-purpose kiosk that can provide basic diagnose on physical discomfort as well as suggesting practical product to alleviate the stress.
As you might notice, sketch 3 also attempts to address the pain point of mental stress (there’s a banana shaped stress-ball on the left hand of the monkey) for students who study for long period of time in library. However upon further consideration we decided not to cover this aspect as:
Note: all 3 versions of kiosk are in monkey shape because monkey looks like human but are not exactly human — while having a human-like appearance could heighten the relatable and interactive appeal of the kiosk, a cute-looking monkey is not TOO human to induce uncanny valley which would evoke uneasiness for our users.
IDENTIFY (AGAIN)
Problem Statement 2.0
After we further specified our target user group within the context of library and clarified that we are not going to focus on addressing the mental problems experienced by fellow students while they study, we revised our problem statement into:
How can we design an interactive de-stress kiosk that helps college students relieve physical stress in a personalized way while they engage in prolonged studying activities in Geisel library?
DESIGN
User Flow
we then began creating an user flow for the overall user experience of our kiosk. We allow users to either (1) begin a diagnosis to see what kind of physical stress they are experiencing, and get recommended treatments from there. or (2) directly navigate to the treatment section and select the product they deem helpful, as users may already know what physical problem they want to address.
Though we gave users the flexibility to opt out from the diagnosis flow, diagnosis is intended to yield more accurate and holistic insights on where they are experiencing discomfort.
DESIGN
Mid-fi prototype (digital)
building on the framework of our user flow, we created a mid-fi prototype for the digital interface.
DESIGN
High-fi prototype (digital)
Style Guide
Based on online research and what our interviewees said about their stressful experience, we want to provide an user experience that feels:
Trustworthy | Soothing | Engaging
high-fi user interface
Time to polish our prototype into a more refined and interactive work! Because I was the person most experienced in using figma, I made 70% of the user interfaces, transition and animation effects. Luckily my team-mates were fantastic fast learners. They tried their best to help with the prototyping process from start to finish.
The high-fi prototype is consisted of 3 major parts: diagnose, treatment, and reward.
main page
diagnosis (vitals + muscle stress)
treatment page (some products are for rent, which would be recycled if returned)
check-out
reward page
High-fi prototype (physical kiosk)
below documented our design process for the physical kiosk from sketches to the final product. I made the high-fi kiosk blueprint for Dr.Monkey and helped print, paint, and assemble it.
Every part of interactive affordances of the physical kiosk matches with the interactive experience with the embedded digital interface.
TEST
Validating Design Solution
Usability Testing
after we assembled both the digital and the physical part of our design, we set out to conduct 5 usability testing sessions where we designed a combination of tasks and questions for users to complete and respond.
Our prototype had received significant positive feedbacks:
Users completed each task generally under 3 mins without blocks, which conveys the intuitiveness of our design.
Most users rated the overall interaction process to be 8/10 as the transition is “natural” and “smooth”.
Most users reported their level of confidence for using the various features of the product to be 8/10
Most users were impressed with the fast responsiveness of our digital prototype.
All users remarked that the ui and appearance design enhanced their user experience with the kiosk.
Next Steps
However, during the usability testing process users also expressed frustrations about our product, based on which we made plans to further improve our digital prototype.
📖 users complained “there was a lot of information” on the diagnosis interface, causing them to feel cognitively overwhelmed
➡️ condense texts into 2-3 lines to create a more cognitively friendly user experience in the diagnosis section
🤔 users pressed certain buttons expecting it to have some kind of response but there was not meant to be such a response
➡️ remove or change the visual status of buttons when it can not be pressed to avoid confusion.
❓ users were confused about where and how they could earn reward points
➡️ add visual cues of reward points as early as when users are seeing recommendations of de-stress product
