What is the Echo Thoughts App?
The Echo Thought app was a group project for B IMD 351. The goal of the project was to create a product that helps with a health issue.
The topic decided by my group was the issue around short-term memory. Our target audience for this project is College-age students (roughly 18-30). The reason why we chose college students as our demographic is due to the relatability as a current college student and the availability of college students for our survey.
Role
Project Manager
Visual Design, User Research, Prototyping, Pitching
Project Period
October - December 2019
Essence statement/ Goals
Echo Thoughts is an app that will provide resources suited for college students to reinforce their daily academic tasks.
By understanding what sort of issues college students often face, we want to provide a free source of resources to help assist students in self-improvement.
Having tools to remind daily tasks, stimulating cognitive games, and studying tools/ tips, we hope to help college students change their negative habits and ways of thinking in a positive manner.
What does the name "Echo Thoughts" mean?
The idea behind the name of the app is that “memory” is essentially a replay of our sensory information. Like an echo, our app will help students replay information in different ways.
Research Survey
Why did we create a research survey?
Prior to the creation of the App, we conducted a survey to find out what types of issues might be causes for short term memory loss in college students. We also used the collected information to find a general direction of what types of functionalities our app should focus on. This process took a while to finish since we needed to find existing research to figure out what actual companies have attempted before & what types of issues we should be focusing on. Not to mention the time it takes to get enough participants to fill out the actual survey form.
What ideas/ topics did the survey include?
The general breakdown of the main ideas/ topics we went through are:
-Stress levels and causes (finding if stress is related to memory issues)
-Studying and ability to focus (remembering information)
-Confidence in memory/ tool dependency (smartphone usage)
-Sleep deprivation (disruption in the brain's memory storage process)
-Inheritable diseases related to memory loss
-Substance usage
There could've been a lot more topics covered in this survey, but we wanted to keep it short so that it won't overwhelm the participants that likely has their own busy schedules. A lot of the questions are topics on other mental health issues because we tend to find a lot of interrelated relationships between the two issues. This is probably why there isn't a single set solution in solving issues with memory loss.
Personas
What is the difference between these two primary users if they're both college students?
The difference between these two students is based on their purpose & reason for using the app. Even though both students are using it to help them remember information, Sally is more of a casual student that wants to get their schedule more organized (focused on the time schedule feature). Theo, on the other hand, wants to improve by learning methods to organize his thoughts (the focus study function).
Storyboard
What are we trying to achieve through this storyboard?
Through this short storyboard, I wanted to create a story that gives a potential scenario of how users might learn about the app while showing the app's main features in the shortest amount of frames. You may be wondering why Theo from the persona isn't like the Theo from this storyboard... The reason was because this storyboard was designed to be like a scripted demo used to plan out our rough draft prototype.
Prototype
Link to Interactive Prototype