Librium; A Design Challenge

During my time in the MICA User Experience Design Master’s of Professional Studies Program - The Design Challenge prompted the development of ‘Librium’ with my teammates; Sam, Jameil, Taylor and Luz.

Librium is an application with the aim to assist users in achieving their goals - whatever they may be! Throughout the creation of Librium, my team and I worked collaboratively in order to create a visually appealing and calming application that our users wanted to use and customize according to the goals they wanted to achieve! As a team, we met and sorted ourselves into two mini teams - Research and Design - conducted Object Oriented UX Sessions and well as worked collaboratively to create a marketable product.

Roles and Responsibilities

As a team, we decided to divide and conquer to ensure we designed Librium to our strengths and stay on track to accomplish our goals within the scope of the project in the 8 week course. Our project plan consisted of 8 intricately planned weeks with weekly team meetings as well as organized deadlines kept via Trello and Kanban Board that was organized by myself. The team separated into the Design Team and Research Team to bring Librium to life.

As a part of the Design Team and a Content Strategist, I was able to create branding for Librium, create components as well as prototype the Librium Application for our sample user, Jeff. Specifically utilizing the software - Figma, Miro, the Adobe Suite as well as other tools to help Librium come to life! In addition to Librium’s Design and Prototype; I also contributed to the Preliminary User Research, User Personas, User Scenarios and Overall Accessibility of the project.

As an Accessibility Specialist, I was able to utilize Figma Plugins, like A11y- Color Contrast Checker, in order to confirm each screens accessibility for those who are differently abled. By doing these accessibility checks throughout the course of the project, we can ensure that we designed Librium with our users at the top of mind to solve for their pain points and any pain points that could develop in the future.

Research Phase

Individually, we designed proto personas to initially visualize out ideal user in the preliminary research phase. Afterwards, the Research team conducted interviews using surveys that resulted in 100% of those interviewed wanting to become more organized and 80% of that group benefiting from writing lists. As a large group competitive analysis was done in order to ensure Librium as the most marketable app to our potential users. The research team then passed along this information to the design team in order to design Librium with our users at the top of mind.

As a member of the design team, we created the persona of Jeffery Hines, a 29-year-old accountant, who seeks a proper work and life balance and prioritization as they return to on-site work. Keeping Jeffery's goals and frustrations of rest we created a user scenario for Jeff's journey through Librium at the recommendation of Tina, his coworker. As a team, we designed the journey map of a typical user as they use Librium and our specific journeys and tasks outline for them.

To nail down the unique flows of each journey through Librium, we utilized object oriented UX analysis to nail down the unique flows of each journey through Librium, we utilized object oriented UX analysis to create specific objects and information architecture for the views of our application once designed. As a team, we test each other with individual tasks for wireframing using the pre-designed assets in our design system and came together weekly to put together our prototype.

Branding & Design Phase

During the Branding and Design Phases, I was able to work within my small team to craft the ‘look and feel’ that we wanted each of our users to experience each time they opened Librium. During Design Team Meetings we nailed down the Design System, color palette, fonts and the name of our application - “Librium,” meaning balance, as this is something we wish for our users upon each use of the application.

In the brainstorming of our application name, each member of the design team came up with potential product names and we utilized a dot voting method to decide collaboratively on the name Librium - a shortened variation of equilibrium in order to reestablish the equilibrium for the new normal that 2020 has brought us with the COVID-19 pandemic. After nailing down the product name we moved onto font, typography and color palettes for our application. In deciding the font – we used fonts that mimic smooth not jarring typography and fonts that mimic handwriting for certain sections of the application.

After nailing down our product name, and font styles we moved onto color themes. Thoughtfully, we decided on colors that exuded calming tones to our users. For example green reflects nature and healing; orange projects confidence or success; blue projects trust and peace; and finally, purple exudes notes of royalty and luxury for each of our users. These colors were thoughtfully integrated into our design system so that designing in our Object Oriented UX sessions and prototyping was a breeze.

Wireframes

The application will contain features like: Social Media Integration; Goal Setting Process; Nudge Frequency in Settings and Configurations; Daily, Weekly and Lifetime Performance Monitoring and Daily Activity Sharing. These features were explicitly shown in our final wireflows, aptly named: Performance Checking, Mood Chart, Affirmations, Tips and Tricks and the added feature of Dark Mode. Each of the wireflows are uniquely designed to solve for our user Jeff’s needs.

Prototype & usability testing

Once we created a successful prototype we tested the application for accessibility purposes – after finding some errors with coloring we corrected and moved onto testing with the following Usability Questions;

Next Steps

As for next steps, we plan to conduct multiple rounds of usability testing, as well as accessibility testing. We plan to revise the application after these testing sessions to include monetary incentives as well as adding more social integration like video chatting throughout Librium.

This assignment tested not only UX and UI skills but project management skills alike; this promoted collaborative efforts virtually as well as self motivating factors individually. Although Librium is not completely ready – no app ever is – however; Librium has the potential to engage many in their quest to become better with work life balance as well as their productivity goals.