Introduction
This project took place at a MUXL hackathon. The brief was to design a product that would encourage a user to become more empathetic with their future self. We focused on health as it’s a huge concern many people have for the future.
As part of the project, we (as a team) created a problem-statement to address a specific problem. We chose “I want to maintain a healthy lifestyle now so that my future self can be healthy”, and then used this to focus our attention.
We brainstormed as a group and decided to narrow this further to an approach that would help people cut down on smoking.
Process
Initially, I took part in an ideation session to allow us to come up with a basic area to focus on (smoking-related health problems). To do this, I helped to create a user persona and mapped user journeys. Following this, I carried out research into smoking statistics which became a core component to the final product and presentation. We then reconvened as a team, and brainstormed various ideas on how to solve the issue.
The solution we decided on was a smart, connected e-cigarette, which would calculate the difference the amount the user was spending on e-liquid rather than cigarettes, as well as the health difference gained by using the device. This would be recorded as ‘life gained’ (It’s possible to work out how much time, on average, each cigarette subtracts from the life of a person).
Both numbers would be presented to the user in the app, and the cash would be put in a special savings account which would be given to the user as a lump sum after a year.
Wireframes
After carrying out the research and analysis, we could finally start designing! Here are some wireframes I created for this project, using Balsamiq.
The onboarding flow for the app - making it as frictionless as possible to allow the user to connect their smart e-cigarette to the application.
The flows here show the happy path for a user checking the amount they’d save in cash each day, then checking the state of their device, and finally withdrawing their cash from the app.
Result
The project was presented to a panel of judges, who were impressed enough to award it second place at the hackathon!
We also got some great feedback, including that we didn’t get first place as there was a fear that our product didn’t help users completely stop smoking - only to cut down. This was a valuable learning experience for me to ensure I really take the brief into account at all stages.
