The client.

Enlitened.

Enlitened is a student wellbeing platform that consists of a student-facing app that supplies student’s knowingly provided answers to wellbeing questions to an information dashboard for university administrators to analyse student experience across the university and appropriately allocate support.

Through the Enlitened student app users submit their answers to weekly wellbeing & university experience questions to the information dashboard.

Doing so provides the students with a way to monitor their mental wellbeing and provides the students with the appropriate tools to seek help if needed.

The students receive a curated list of supportive content based on their responses to questions and can also submit ideas for improvements to the university, which can be voted for by other students and are visible on the university administrator’s via the Enlightened information dashboard. Each of these actions within the app rewards the user with points to spend on uni supplies, cafe food and merchandise.

The problem.

Research strategy

As part of the ongoing research strategy at Enlitened, the product managers and I undertook weekly interviews with student’s of various levels of app engagement. Continuously listening to our users in this way provided an opportunity for us to gauge how our users felt about the app and identify any issues we had missed in our usual focused research plan.
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Insights from this, combined with the results of in-app feedback and lab-based user testing I had conducted for previous new features revealed the following...

Investigation.
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Lab testing:

Lab testing I conducted to analyse the app’s on-boarding process allowed me to watch students interact with the app for the first time. The “talk aloud” methodology of the test, gave me insight into the first impressions of the app and it’s features.

This helped me to understand what caught our user’s attention and what was missed.  It was clear, based on the participants' interaction with the app and the way in which they navigated it’s features, that the app felt disjointed. 

Profile page design.

Together with the Product manager, through a process of independent ideation and discussion, we explored how these disjointed features could be combined into one seamless “Home/profile” page with a user flow that guided the user through the capabilities of the app.

Feature prioritisation.

I started by investigating which features the student users valued most via Usabilityhub.com. The order of features in the new user flow was to be prioritised by balancing feature popularity with the university’s priorities for the app.

• Profile - name, badges, settings, points were the most valued by the students
• Questions - Most valuable to the universities due to the information it provides
• Articles - valuable to the user and highlights the curation of content based on the user’s answers to questions
• Student ideas - valuable to students and university staff users
• Rewards - Set clear goals to encourage action within the app

Results of user scored features based on interest

New "Profile" user flow.

With our priorities on the feature order set I could begin to design the user flow of the new profile page.
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This user-flow design consists of small and manageable interactions that guide the user through the key features of the app with minimal cognitive load and rewarding them in the process thus encouraging repeated use.

Profile/home page user flow

Layout Design.

With this user flow in mind I developed the visual interface through an iterative process including…

Brand application adhering to the design system and developing new assets in the brand style where necessary

Wireframing (both sketch and digital) to explore ideas and visualise the information architecture

User validation testing methods utilising static and interactive designs of varying levels of fidelity

Utilising the "Hooked" model.

By using the “Hooked” model I sought to create a simple, habit forming, user flow that strung together a list of rewarding and repeatable interactions.

• Trigger - Trigger an interaction with the app with a notification “You have new questions to answer!”
• Action - Present the user with a clear CTA to “Answer more questions.”
• Variable reward - Once the questions have been answered highlight the users reward by showing the coins they have earned and the curated content they have been recommended.
• Investment - Show the user all they have achieved by highlighting their question streak, achievement earned and progress bar in the profile section at the top of the page. Support this by highlighting the popular rewards at their university as a goal to aim for to encourage repeated use.

The Hook model - Nir Eyal

Validation.

Test methods.

I tested my Wireframes and visual designs throughout the design process on usability hub. We ran these tests through a number of iterations with up to 27 different users at a time to iron out any interaction issues.

The tests involved A/B tests , Heatmap first click tests and Surveys on the design

Lab based user testing with interactive prototypes.

Once myself and the product owner was happy with the design and the results we were receiving were positive I created fully interactive prototypes with figma, to test the designs in lab based user tests.

I recruited and screened a number of participants to identify and select an appropriate cross-section of our user base with varying levels of app engagement.

The test script was written to test how the design had improved upon the 4 key issues raised in the research and identify any interaction issues with the new design that were previously untestable with static designs

How this new design solves the research problems.

Summary.