Case Study: Wellness project

5 min readApr 7, 2019

For the 2nd project of Ironhack bootcamp, we had to work on a digital solution relating to wellness.

The 6 dimensions of wellness.

I chose to work on the balance between work and private life. The topic was interesting, but at this stage of the project, I really had no idea on how to build a digital tool on this “human” topic.

For this project, I followed the Design Thinking process in 5 steps.

Step 1: emphasize

Research

Finding a balance between work and private life is a important society topic. There are a lot of articles on it, and even a full expression “work-life balance”.

For many people, a balanced work-life means having time for themselves, their families and friends and having flexibility in their work.

User Research: survey and interviews

For my survey, I mainly targeted the working people. But where to find them? Although working people are everywhere, I did not really know how to reach them. I finally used social networks and had help from my classmate. Within the day, I had over 60 answers to my survey which really helped me to take off.

From internet research and survey feedback, I felt that work-life balance was a human resource challenge, and at this stage, I was still doubtful on finding a suitable digital solution. One data doesn’t help: 74% of people were not using any digital tool for organizing work and private life…

I interviewed 4 persons on 1–1 basis: 1 freelance, 2 part-time, 1 full time, only 1 of them found her work life balance.

Affinity map

After grouping subjects into categories…

Empathy Map

Persona

Let’s meet Sarah, a 36 year old working mum who aims to find a balance between her work and her family life.

User Journey

Pain points are that Sarah cannot work as much as she can as she’s often interrupted in her work by other people, her work is rarely finished at the end of the day, and she also has to manage her family life.

Step 2: Define

Statement

“How may we help Sarah to be more efficient at work so that she can find some time for herself?”

Benchmark

74% of people who answered the survey were not using any digital tool… The few tools mentioned were Calendar, Notes, ToDo list tools, and once Trello, Forest and Rescue Time. This said, it was hard to identify which tool would be the most suitable for my project. Indeed, any tool that helped organizing time work could be considered, so there were a lot of them: calendar, notes, project management, todo list management, time management.

Step 3: ideation

We used the crazy8 and Round Robin method for our ideation phase. Some worst ideas also came in mind, as we were running out of inspiration (ex: cut all connexion à 18h30 sharp).

Main ideas that came out from this session:

the need to have a planner
the need to prioritize tasks
the need to check the time spent on each task
having a personal assistant (kind of chatbot) or great colleagues who could remind her her activities
Pomodoro timer

Feature prioritization

I decided to keep the need to check the time spent on each task as the main feature.

So after this choice, I went back to my benchmark for a second round of analysis. After defining the statement of my project, I narrowed the list to time management applications, and especially time tracking. There were still a lot of them.

Then I made another round of benchmark among time tracking tools, and found at last my target solution. It will be a tool that should record activity automatically.

MVP

I chose to work on a time tracking app, as Sarah will more likely use this tool to analyze her activity at work and take action for improvement.

The MVP will include:

Login and Profile management
Record activity
Dashboard
Report showing the gap between the working hours and the extra time
Notifications when it’s overtime

User Flow

The task of my user flow is mainly to record activity and track them and see the report.

Step 4: prototyping

Step 5: testing

From the web dev point of view, the solution does not present any technical difficulty. The main question will be how to define the categories of activities (which one should be considered distracting, which one have high productivity…). First tests with 3 persons also helped to see that there were a few steps missing:

where to go after the recording is stopped
where to go after the report is sent
how to create categories of websites

A mobile app

In addition to the above desktop app, I have added a mobile app that will allows more user interaction. Indeed, the mobile app should help my user Sarah to: