My prototype is for a mobile companion app for a smart bed that tracks how you sleep while also serving as an alarm to wake you up.
Perhaps because I was talking to both my interviewees after dinner, but both of them mentioned during their interviews that they were tired, so I chose this out of my brainstorm ideas thinking that having some kind of smart bed with a companion app would be helpful for them to get better nights of rest.
The app starts out with a home screen when you can scroll down and see how you've slept over the past few days. At the top, you can access the settings, a calendar (to pick a specific night whose data you want to look at), your alarms, your sleep data for today, and the advice that the app has for you based on your sleep habits. In the alarms menu, you can turn on/off alarms as well as set new ones so that the bed can wake you up (both through sound and vibrations).
My sample user was a random oldneighbor I found while walking through my apartment while looking for non-college student. Unfortunately, he didn't want his photo taken so I don't have any photos of him using my app. He did give me some good insight into my app however.
Starting from the home screen, I could tell he was confused by the graphs even though I had told him beforehand that this was a companion app for a smart bed. I think for first time users, there should definitely be a tutorial on what these graphs are (They basically represent how well you slept through different parts of the day). On the bright side, he was able to figure out what they meant after I asked him to guess what he thought they meant. But he didn’t see the different dates on the graphs, so I should probably make them bigger as he thought that they were all from the same day. He told me that he thought the graphs should be bigger on the home screen and utilize more of the space instead of having such large margins. In fact, he said it would probably be best to just show one graph at a time and have the user scroll down to see other days on the home screen.
He was able to recognize that the gear led to the settings and that the back arrows meant to go back. He also liked how clicking on the calendar icon led to a calendar dropdown and once he picked a date and saw the resulting screen, he immediately knew that he was looking at sleep data for a specific day.
Understanding the alarms was simple process for him - he quickly understood that his theoretical smart bed could wake him up and even vibrate to do so and he understood how the green colored dates are the days the alarm would ring. But he did fail to actually make an alarm as he hit the back button instead of the green checkmark to finalize the alarm. He told me how he didn’t see that checkmark at all and how I should make it bolder.
He liked the advice page, but didn’t know the red buttons were buttons; once informed that however, he guessed correctly that they were there to remove advice listings, but he didn’t understand why anyone would want to do that until I explained my viewpoint on how you would get advice every few days and might want to remove old listings as they become irrelevant.
Overall, he concluded with “I thoroughly enjoyed that. Very realistic.” Based on all his insights, I can see that I definitely need to make some buttons (e.g. checkmark for making alarms, delete button for advice) in my app more apparent and increase the size of various items in the UI (e.g. the graphs) to make them more noticeable and helpful to the user.
Here are the 12 ideas that I came up with for home/office apps. Obviously, I chose the smart bed companion app idea.
1. A app for controlling smart lights in your home
2. An app guiding you through troubleshooting steps to take when your computer isn't working - makes the lives of IT workers easier.
3. An app that autosaves for you when you're working on your device (e.g. auto save in Photoshop or Microsoft Word).
4. An app that works with a central device for controlling all the wifi devices in your home (some kind of smart router).
5. An app that makes recommendations for your shopping list based on the contents in your smart refrigerator.
6. An app that works with your smart bed to keep track of sleep and also serve as an alarm.
7. An app that works with a special pencil that keeps track of your strokes to convert your writing into typed text in the app.
8. An app that works with a smart bottle to keep track of what you drink and how much.
9. An app that gives your data on your trash by pairing with your smart trash can.
10. An app that works with your smart jacket to warm up the jacket when you're cold.
11. An app that gives you data on your cat's pooping habits by pairing with your smart kitty litter box.
12. An app that automatically clocks employees in and out for work based on their location.
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