Studying digital wellbeing
Part 1- Research through interfaces as design probes
It’s been 9 years, after I switched from using a feature phone to a smartphone. It’s been 9 years, after switching from mere entertainment of listening music and occasionally catching a FM radio signal to wandering inside a myriad of apps that without fail seek my attention in almost every part of daily routine! Never was I tired of carrying this huge luggage of apps wherever I go until recently it has become too heavy. Lesser the backpacks, easier the journey! This led me to conduct a study on digital wellbeing.
Here is the first part of the study where I conduct very simple and short experiments to understand what problems deserve a solution from an app and how the necessity of a mobile app is perceived by people.
Probes for the experiment
My study began with an assumption that, in the process of building a mobile app, problem space is identified first and then an app is created to solve it with intense research at each stage of design process. Finding some apps like “iBeer”, “Send Me To Heaven”, “Pimple popper” and a few more on the store, the above assumption was questioned. Curious to know how big a problem should be to gain the solution as a mobile app and who defines the necessity of an app, I conducted experiments by creating few probes.
The criteria for designing these probes were,
- Probes will be a set of interfaces prototyped to be an app.
- The necessity of these interfaces are unknown while designing.
- Probes should gather insights on the perspective of the users towards them.
EmoMe: A set of interfaces that presents several emojis in sequence and asks the user to imitate the emoji shown on the screen.
When this experimental prototype was sent to around 30 people, the responses were mixed on how useful this app is. There were almost equal amount of people who were likely and unlikely to install such an app out of their boredom. The interesting part was that some tried to imagine their own problem statement for the app. They also gave an average rating of 3 for the app!
As the responses from the first experiment were mixed, I created another set of interfaces as the next iteration for the study.
Wipe: A set of interfaces asking the person to wipe the screen until it turns white.
When the prototype was sent to around 40 people, around 40% said they would install the app as the interface is clean and legible. Though some of them said the app would not help them, some others did imagine their own version of the problem statement like, “the app helps in understanding that cleaning is not an easy task”, “this app helps in relieving stress”, “the app is an instruction based activity”, “this app is fun during boredom” etc.
Insights from the experiments
The responses of the experiment varied largely but it was interesting to focus on that small set of people who went against the assumption made in the beginning of the study. Apps are indeed created after identifying problem space and finding an opportunity to create a positive intervention. But, every user also has their own definition of the app. The use case of the app vary in large range when it goes to users’ hands. Sometimes, the use case is defined by the users themselves. No matter what app is launched on the store, a set of users can always tend to install the app out of curiosity and extract the necessity of the app.
The thought that every app has something to do for us, is somewhere instilled in the users’ brain which tries to interpret the usage of the app even though it has nothing for them.
Thus, it’s now, not really necessary that a problem should match a certain criteria to gain a solution from an app. The users anyway tend to define their own imagined purpose for every app. It is funny but true to see such a change in the user psychology.
Similar is probably my problem of making my app luggage heavy. Installing apps without understanding if it is really useful for me and once installed not letting go of it!
