COZY SELF
What is CozySelf?
CozySelf is a motivational mobile application, for parents living with different stressors and many responsibilities that allows stress relief within a safe space to enhance healthy lifestyle, emotional well-being, sense of independence and quality time. As part of my UI/UX course at Springboard, I created CozySelf, a personal project aimed at showcasing my expertise in the design process of user interfaces and experiences.
Key Skills :
Ideation, User Interviews, User Stories, Journey Maps, Sketching, Workflows, Wireframing, Visual Design, Illustrating
~~~
Key Skills : Ideation, User Interviews, User Stories, Journey Maps, Sketching, Workflows, Wireframing, Visual Design, Illustrating ~~~
Motivation
Over half of my closest friends are parents who have many stressors in their life while raising their children. “ I need a break!” is an expression that you can hear from all overwhelmed parents.
Problem
Parenting is an extremely rewarding experience, however it can also be challenging and stressful task. While raising their children, parenting role and other responsibilities that parents must fulfill sometimes be overwhelming.
Goal
I aim to explore how I might reduce the stress of the parents who have parental anxiety while raising their children and improve the experience of parenting in more enjoyable and less stressful way.
Why use Cozy Self?
SeLf CarE
Cozy Self aims to support your cardiovascular health, enhance cognitive abilities, and increase your overall energy levels. Thanks to this support, parents can prioritize their own well-being amidst their parenting responsibilities.
Plan
Cozy Self is specifically designed to optimize life organization, boost productivity, and manage stress levels. The app facilitates efficient scheduling and enhances time management skills, leading to positive improvements in overall productivity and stress management.
SelF LOVE
During interviews with parents, the most common complaint I discovered was the lack of personal time while raising children. To address this, the app offers various self-care options, such as journal writing, to alleviate feelings of anxiety and stress.
Research
Secondary Research & User Interview
Secondary research
After conducting extensive research by scanning books, reading articles and watching videos on parenting stress, I have successfully identified the primary factors that contribute to stress and challenges for parents in raising their children. Parenting stress can be influenced by various factors such as lack of support, financial pressures, time constraints, balancing work and family, behaviour management, and meeting societal expectations.
User interview
I conducted five in-person interviews with five particular parents at different stages of life. User interviews were invaluable tool that helped me gain user insights, improve usability, validate assumptions and create user centered solutions.
Synthesis
Affinity Map & Persona
Affinity Map
I grouped all the data that had the same code. I had data grouped by topics and codes for each topic. In my affinity map there are three broad descriptive codes and corresponding groupings.
Stressors: Parents have different stressors in their life such as lack of support, financial issues, living outside of their home country that affect their parenting role negatively.
Responsibilities: Apart from parenting, parents have many responsibilities such as work, household chores that make them feel overwhelmed.
Time Management: Parents can not organize their life effectively and they can not maintain effective scheduling.
PERSONA
Ada is a working mom who has many other responsibilities that make her feel overwhelmed.She wants to balance her life, reduce her daily stress while parenting and have quality time for herself.
I put myself in Ada’s shoes and stopped at every point in her journey to understand her feelings and identify potential solutions for her problems.
Ideate
Brainstorming & User Story
Site Map & User Flow
Brainstorming
At this point I had a large quantity of ideas that I narrowed down to the most innovative ones in order to generate best possible solutions for the users’ main needs.
USEr story
I created the user story in order to focus on prioritizing customers’ needs. As the user story expressed the customers’ perspective, I could focus on a better outcome.
Site Map
I created the site map, a visual diagram for my application, that provided me keep track of the different screens and visualize the connection between them.
user flow
I considered all the ways user could navigate through my application to identify the essential path, so I created the user-flow, a visual representation of a specific route, that a user might take through my app to achieve a goal.
Design
Sketching & Low-Fidelity Wireframe
High Fidelity Wireframe & Prototype
Sketching
Sketching was a quick way to make my ideas tangible so that I could test and adjust them before I made digital versions of my designs. Sketching provided me with an intimate insight on how layouts would work.
Guerilla Usability Testing
I was testing the sketches aiming to get initial feedback on the designs I had made and I was hoping to discover the problem points of the designs to iterate by conducting guerrilla usability tests. I created Marvel POP clickable prototypes of my paper sketches which allowed my participants to interact with my screens in a more true-to-life manner.
Low-fidelity Wireframe
Wireframe is a visual representation of a user interface that could help me determine how elements would be placed on the page. It was a great way to map my product’s content. Moreover, wireframe offered the flexibility and room for innovation that comes with sketching an idea.
Wireflow
Wire-flow is a visual representation of the screens and the interactions a user follows to complete specific tasks. Wire-flows are useful as a collaboration and ideation technique for me to think through user workflows and tasks and to ideate screen designs at each step in the process.
Moodboard
I gathered a collage of imagery (mood-board), from various sources to represent the visual aesthetic I would like to incorporate into the UI of my product. The Mood-board provided a great inspiration when I made decisions about color, typography, imagery as I built the style guide for my product.
Style Guide
I created a Style Guide that is a set of rules for how my brand should be displayed. The Style Guide allowed me to create the content representing the brand cohesively.
Usability Test
Guerilla Usability Testing & Usability Testing
guerilla usability testing
Conducting Guerilla usability testing was valuable because it allowed for quick insights and validation of design decisions. It was cost-effective and time-efficient, providing valuable user feedback that was used to identify usability issues and make immediate improvements.
second usability testing
By observing and gathering feedback from real users, the testing process helped me identify usability issues, ensuring that the end product meets user needs and expectations. Usability test played a pivotal role in creating my product Cozy Self that is intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable for users. thereby fostering success and customer satisfaction.
Final Design
High Fidelity Wireframe
