Wake App
Challenge
Our morning routine is usually disrupted once we fail to wake up on time. Most of us use an alarm clock to help us, but we keep hitting that evil snooze button until we are late. I suffer from a terminal snooze disease and so does a lot of people. The snooze disease is an epidemic that needs to be stopped and I might have the cure.
Background
This is my final project for an online learning initiative of Delft University of Technology on product design. The goal is to identify challenges in our morning routine and design a product that can solve the problem.
The challenge is how to change this behavior and get people to commit to their alarm schedule.
We started at defining what is a morning routine and look into our own morning routine to understand what, how and why we do the routine.
Looking into my personal morning routine
Defining the problem
By looking into my routine, I figured that my routine is often broken when an unexpected circumstance occurs. In my case, waking up late is the usual suspect.
Although I use an alarm, I always put it on snooze until I ran out of time. This will cause me not to do certain things and impact my duties and mood the whole day.
Generating Ideas
Based on the problems identified, I started sketching ideas as much as I can. Ideas should not be limited to a digital product, it can be anything as long as it addresses the problem. I end up with these 3 concepts.
Evaluating Ideas
Creating the process tree.
By writing down the process tree, it gives us an overview of what might be needed in the production, distribution, use and how it will be discarded.
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Writing down the requirements.I listed down the requirements and sorted the “demands” and “wishes”. Demands being the most nescessary features of the product and wishes as nice-to-have.
Picking the best idea
By using the Harris Profile, we revisit the defined problem and elaborate on the requirements and used the Harris Profile technique to choose the final concept for development.
The mobile app alarm has a clear edge based on the requirements and criteria that we have defined earlier.
The Wake App Concept
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The difference between this alarm app is that it personalizes an alarm that will be created just for you by people you care about. This creates a personal attachment and helps build a commitment to your alarm.
Designing the screens for testing
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Rough design of key screens to be able to illustrate the flow from:
1. Selecting the “waker”
2. Recording the wake up call
3. Setting the alarm
Validating designs
Since I dont have enough time to prototype all functionalities, I created the key screens I need for my user testing tasks.The following tasks was asked from the “Invitee” and “Waker”:
1. (Invitee) Select a friend from your facebook firends or phone contatcs.
2. (Waker) Accept invite and record a wake up call
3. (Invitee) Select “waker” and set the alarm
The users were also observed to see how they were interacting with the UI, if they are confused or able to follow the flow.
Testing with friends as “invitee” and “waker” with a simple clickable prototype via Marvel.
Results & Learnings
As expected, you rarely get the right design the first time. Things that may seem obvious to you as a designer but can be vague to your target user. I observed this personally while testing, some users will pause for a while to determine what button to click, what’s the next step or just waiting for something to happen on the screen when there is none.
The beauty of prototyping and testing often is that it validates our assumptions so that we can iterate our designs.
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Some people found the idea novel, but some raised a valid concern about disguising an alarm as a call. This can be potentially "negative" as users may become aware that this is an alarm and prefer to ignore it until a real call from the same person and the user ignores it assuming it is an alarm, like the boy who cried wolf.
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This project is probably my first product design following a proper design process. As a person transitioning from advertising to UX design, I've learned a lot from this course which I still use up to now.
