The Challenge: I have seen family members and close friends suffering from mental health issues. We need a holistic approach to help people manage various situations and aspects that lead to stress, anxiety and depression. Over a period of time, wanted to design simple tools to help people find support and overcome stress, anxiety and depression.

The Solution: Stress affects people in multiple ways. Some stress can be dealt with proper planning and by not letting distractions take away the valuable time we have. To start with, designed FocusOn, an app and responsive website that helps people eliminate distractions, plan, FocusOn their BIGThing, and complete some meaningful tasks on daily basis, thereby reducing stress, improving the productivity and the overall peace of mind.

Project duration: Jan 2023 – Apr 2023

My Role: 

• Conducting user interviews & research.
• Designing the paper wireframes, digital wireframes, and the low-fidelity prototype.
• Designing the mockups and the high-fidelity prototype.
• Conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility and iterating on designs.
• Determining information architecture, and coming up with a responsive design.

User Research: Summary

Conducted interviews and created empathy maps to understand the users I’m designing for and their needs. A primary user group identified through research was working professionals who get distracted, get stressed and as a result lose the peace of mind. 

Research revealed that the users need options to disconnect distractions, identify their main priority for the day and working towards the completion  of their top most priority would eliminate the stress build up. Other user problems included tracking the distractions on daily basis and working on action plan to gradually eliminate the distractions.

Problem Statement & User Personas:

• Arjun is a working professional, who needs to focus at work, because distractions lead to missed deadlines, causing stress.

• Tham is working professional who needs to regulate sleep schedule because improper sleep makes him restless and unable to focus on work.

Competitive Audit

Helped in finding the  gaps and optimise the features that would help users FocusOn what matters the most and reduce stress.

Ideation & Paper Wireframes

The ideation exercise helped to address gaps identified in the competitive audit. The focus was specifically on stress reduction by eliminating distraction.

Digital Wireframes & Low-Fidelity Prototype

After ideating and drafting some paper wireframes, created the initial designs. These designs focused on delivering personalized guidance to users to help prioritise the BIGThing for the day. The low-fidelity prototype connected the user flow of identifying the BIGThing, tracking the distractions, and helped in getting early feedback from users.

FocusOn: Low-Fidelity Prototype

Usability Study: Findings

Mockups

Based on the insights from the usability studies, applied design changes like providing a cue to figure out the BIGThing, option to note down ToDos and help users analyse how they spent their day.

High-Fidelity Prototype

The refined high-fidelity prototype after making changes based on the usability study.

FocusOn: High-Fidelity Prototype

Accessibility Considerations

Sitemap

The sitemap helped in organizing structure of each screen, to ensure a cohesive and consistent experience across devices.

Responsive Design for Desktop site.

Takeaways

Impact: The FocusOn app helps in the actual objective of reducing stress by helping users prioritise what matters the most, reduce distractions and work towards accomplishing the BIGThing for the day.

Quote from peer feedback: “This is simple and effective”

What I learned: While designing the FocusOn app, I learned that we should keep talking to the end users and keep iterating so as to meet the real needs of the users.

Next steps

Thank you for taking time to go through my work! I m working hard and constantly learning to improve my design skills and specialise as UX Researcher. Your feedback will help become better 🙂

email: ashokprabhut@gmail.com 

At leisure, please glance at my thoughts & ideas: www.ashokprabhu.com