My Health Quiz
App Prototype
The aim of the project was to educate young people on health literacy and provide motivation to encourage behavioural changes to get young people healthier through a technological intervention.
This project was brought into IADT by the Irish Heart Foundation who were eager to find a way to teach young school age children, through technological intervention, about their physical and mental health.
Research
Research was conducted by analysing a literature review on the current state of the field of healthy eating interventions in adolescents that had been composed by researchers in UCD. Following this initial research, a representative of the Irish Heart Foundation presented what they were looking for in an application and potential on-site programme for educating young people about health.
Research of the area of educational apps and the factors that could be included was conducted and I decided that a good way to educate young people on their health would be a health quiz app that was interconnected to different schools around Ireland with a national leaderboard. Gamification is an important motivator in apps and competition in the form of leaderboards were seen as effective in educational apps. Gamified goals, such as badges, within an app allow for a social element as classmates identify with those who are working for the same goal.
User personas were then developed to ensure the design met the needs of the intended users!
Paper Prototyping
I created a paper prototype of the app showing the various screens needed for the app. Using my creativity and previous design experience I sketched out screens for pages including a home page, sections for each quiz topic, leaderboard, badge page, quiz questions and answers.
This paper prototype was a rough example of what I wanted the high fidelity app prototype to look like and through feedback from fellow students, I made changes as I went along.
This constant discussion of ideas and sharing of opinions allowed for a real-world feel to this process and meant that I could create improvements that may otherwise have been missed.
High Fidelity App Prototyping
Following the creation and presentation of the paper prototypes in my Information Design & Multimedia module, we had to continue the prototype process and create a high fidelity prototype in our Usability module. I inputted my initial design idea into Photoshop and added more colour than my original drawings.
I initially planned to assign a colour to each quiz topic as it appeared more fun but following user testing, I found that this confused users and they wanted something more clearer. I changed all the topics back to a dark blue and added icons to distinguish each topic.
Learnings
The process of designing and creating this app prototype taught me a lot about the design process and how important user testing is. A lecturer said “fail fast and fail often” and this was very helpful when initially throwing around ideas as I learned to not become too invested in initial ideas that would probably not have worked out.
This project required a systematic approach, which is a key skill of mine, and seeing the progression of the project throughout was gratifying. User testing played a massive part in the high fidelity prototyping phase of my app as I had become invested in the aesthetic of my app and overlooked how simplifying the design would improve the overall look of the app considerably. This learning is something I will remember. Overall, this project was engaging and gave a view to what it is like to work on a UX design project and use my organisational and creative skills.