Hubble
Designing an end-to-end app that helps motivate people to practice their hobbies
Role
UX/UI Designer
Project Type
Collaborative End-to-end App
Timeline
August 2022 (2 weeks)
THE PROBLEM
Young adults struggle to pursue their hobbies
People today pursue hobbies at lower rates; young adults especially abandon their hobbies as they grow older and get into things they think they’re supposed to put their time into. However, studies have shown that people who practice hobbies experience less stress and depression, have better work performance, and have a more upbeat outlook on life. The benefits of engaging in a hobby extend to hours, even days later.
THE SOLUTION
A mobile app that motivates users to practice their hobbies on a regular basis, while building community
Post to View
Gamification where friends’ posts are locked and unable to view until you post proof of practicing your hobby first
Friends’ posts disappear after 24 hours, making social consequences motivate you to commit to sharing your hobbies more often
Do it with friends
Share your hobbies and your progress with your friends and/or groups
Encourage each other through comments and reactions
Gain and spread positive influence to each other
Discover and explore
Join or create new groups and invite your friends to do it with you
Browse through different categories to discover new hobbies and get inspired
Build community within your hobby
Track your progress
Access an archive of your previous posts in your profile calendar
Be motivated to fill up your calendar and practice your hobbies more often
View previous encouragement you’ve received from your friends
SECONDARY RESEARCH
Competitive + Comparative Feature Analysis
We found in our research that there were not that many hobby apps out there, so with the idea of tracking your hobbies, we analyzed four habit tracking apps, as well as four popular social apps with similar goals to motivate users.
Competitive Analysis
Comparative Feature Analysis
USER SURVEYS + INTERVIEWS
Interviewees were more likely to practice hobbies when there was some sort of accountability.
Although we saw from research that accountability was important, we sent out 24 surveys and conducted interviews with 4 people, two of which said no when they were asked if they had a hobby, and two who practiced hobbies regularly. We asked them the questions below to find trends on what motivates them to pursue hobbies and what their pain points were, then organized our data through affinity mapping.
Research Questions:
Why is a hobby valuable to you?
How do you define a hobby?
What are some current challenges you face with your hobby?
How do you keep yourself accountable?
What motivates you to keep pursuing your hobby?
What would motivate you to start a hobby?
Would you prefer to practice your hobby alone or with others? Why?
THE MAIN INSIGHT
Practicing hobbies should be enjoyable.
Our initial hypothesis was to create a hobby tracking app, but quickly realized through our research that maintaining hobbies should not feel like a task or a chore. Hobbies are practiced for pleasure and enjoyment. We found the following patterns when it came to what really motivates users to practice hobbies:
Community 🏘
96% of interviewees like to do hobbies with other people, stating that friends keep them accountable.
Pleasure ☺️
Majority of users are motivated by the happiness and entertainment practicing hobbies provide.
Progress 📈
Seeing progress and the desire to grow was another driving factor of the interviewees’ motivation to pursue hobbies.
Competition 🏆
Interviewees were motivated by some friendly competition and the desire to be the best in what they practice.
SOLUTION + IMPROVEMENTS
Create a mobile application that allows users to engage with friends while having fun developing their hobbies every day.
Based on various feedback from multiple usability tests and feedback from my mentor, we continually iterated our design with 4 major improvements (and a lot of minor improvements):
Adding groups feature
Based on mentor feedback, while the app had social aspects, it lacked the community building aspect to it. We then decided to add a groups feature where users can discover new groups, as well as create or join one.
Improving the navigation
We added tabs on top of the home page to separate and organize the friends feed page and the groups page, as well as making it more familiar to younger users that use other popular social apps.
Simplify reactions
Based on our usability test, we found that users struggled to react by holding down on the react icon. We then decided to simplify it by adding a couple positive emojis to choose from to encourage friends by just a click.
Making it more accessible
After running usability tests and accessibility tests, we made some minor changes throughout the app to ensure it stayed accessible. One of the updates we made were on the calendar and it’s buttons based on feedback we received.
HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE
The Final Solution✨
REFLECTIONS + LESSONS LEARNED
A few things I’ve learned:
This was my first ever end-to-end app UX project where I worked together with a friend (yay!). More than the actual output, however— I’m immensely grateful to have been through an entire UX process collaboratively, so I can see what it’s actually like to work on a team. On that note, a few things I’ve learned:
You didn’t fail— you just found another way that won’t work.
From noticing mistakes in my UI to uncovering more foundational UX problems in my app, I’m thankful to have constantly asked for feedback from my peers and my mentor. In the end, we pushed to have the app as best we could, and did not let our own thinking stop us from questioning if our decisions were truly best for the user.I love collaborating, but it holds it’s challenges.
One of my favorite parts of working together with someone (aside from it being my good friend!) was being able to jump off each other’s ideas and defining a solution together. When we got stuck, we were able to brainstorm together and pin point things we might have missed if we worked alone. I also got to practice and learn different ways to research and define our research. One of the biggest challenges of collaborating for me personally was our different preferences when it came to our UI. In the end, we learned to communicate and come to a solution that was best for our users.
Next steps:
Expand and build on adding friends page, profile, and animations for reactions
Add features that allow you to view your progress in the groups you’ve joined
Create a light-mode prototype
Integrate the Hubble calendar to sync with ios/google calendar
Ability to customize UI