balancekeepr - how young professionals keep track of work-life balance and prevent burnout
Project Overview
10 Weeks from July 2022 - Sept 2022
Role: UX Designer, UX Researcher
Tools: Figma, Invision, POP, Procreate
Platform: IOS
I completed a full-time UX Design Bootcamp with BrainStation to obtain a Diploma in UX Design. During the Bootcamp, I was tasked with completing a 10-week capstone project to create a compelling and practical mobile application with my topic of choosing. This project was an end-to-end UX design process in which I led the research, design, user testing and development for this mobile application.
Introduction
balancekeepr: The wellness app for managing a healthy work-life balance.
Users create and manage events in a calendar that combines their work and personal life. The app calculates the amount of hours scheduled for work vs personal life, then presents analytics that track the user’s daily and weekly work-life balance against a goal they previously set.
View PrototypeA poor work-life balance can cause negative effects on one's personal wellbeing. The total demands of work can lead to a lack of time for personal life, which causes individuals to feel overwhelmed, stressed and in extreme cases, burnout.
59%
51%
of millennials feel burnout
of Gen Z workers feel burnout
Areas that suffered due to poor work-life balance
Results from a survey of 600 young professionals that asked "what part of your life has suffered the most due to poor work-life balance?"
Research Objectives
What am I looking for?
Identify the different factors that young professionals have that prevents them from having a work-life balance.
Understand the challenges that young professionals currently face in maintaining a work life balance.
What do I want to achieve?
Find a viable solution to help young professionals balance work life and personal life to avoid negative effects in their wellbeing.
Primary Research
Since Gen Z workers and Millennials are a large portion of the workforce who feels burnout, I focused on this demographic for my user interviews. I conducted 3 decontextualized interviews with requirements that they are a Gen Z or Millennial and are currently working full time office hours. With these requirements I can find the challenges and behaviours they have on maintaining a work-life balance.
Methodology:
User Interviews
After completing 3 user interviews I mapped their key pain points, motivations and behaviours for maintaining a work-life balance.
Key Insights:
Once I had my pain points, motivations and behaviours sorted, I found 3 key insights throughout my user interviews.
Coping and Distractions
Young professionals need distractions to cope with any work/life imbalances.
Work Pressures
Young professionals are overworked to meet the demands of their careers.
Support Planning
Young professionals must plan activities outside of work due to busy schedules.
I decided to focus my design solution on the Support Planning insight because planning for the future can give a more long-term solution in comparison to distractions, and work pressures is more targeted to the employer.
"How might we support young professionals so that they can plan life activities outside of their work schedules to improve work-life balance?"
(DEFINE)
Creating the Persona
Using the different key insights from my user interviews I created a persona that represents a reliable and realistic representation of the key user group (young professionals 18-35 years old). Having my key insight in mind helped construct an archetype that can be a design solution for the work-life balance problem.
Using this persona of Cindy I can understand her end-to-end experience for this problem space. This persona helps with experience mapping so I can identify moments of opportunity where I could intervene with my digital solution.
User Stories
In order to begin brainstorming the functionality and features of my design solution, I created several user stories from Cindy's persona. In a scenario where Cindy wants to plan life activities outside of work, user stories I created included ways to get her to prioritize her work, organize deadlines and find ways to incorporate self care to help with anxiety.
Then, I sorted these user stories across 4 epics:
—Planning ahead for life activities
—Collaborating with Others to plan life activities
—Being notified/reminders about future plans
—Tracking personal and work goals to maintain a work-life balance
Within the 4 epics I chose "tracking personal and work goals" as the primary epic for my design solution. I mapped the user stories within that epic to create the main task flow for my design solution.
Task Flow
Once I had the main task for my design solution I mapped out the exact process of how the user would navigate through it.
The flow starts with the user setting their personal goals for number of hours per week to achieve a work-life balance. Then, the user inputs work and personal events in the calendar to manage their schedule (further filtered by sub-categories). Finally, the task flow ends when the app presents analytics on how well the user is at achieving their target goals, which is presented on a weekly and monthly timeline.
(IDEATE)
Solution Sketching
With my task flow my next step was to sketch each screen. Going through many rounds of sketching and searching through inspiration, I created a final sketch for my wireframes.
(PROTOTYPING & TESTING)
Wireframing
Taking my final solution sketches I brought them to life with greyscale wireframes in Figma.
Changes from Testing
Making prototypes with my greyscale wireframes I conducted usability tests with 5 users in the first round and another 5 users in the second round. This was crucial to obtain practical, real-time feedback so I can improve the design and provide a more optimal user experience. I recorded all my outputs from testing and categorized all my issues in a design prioritization matrix so I knew what I needed to change for my high fidelity wireframes.
1. Users didn't like having to manually type the date and time and wanted a date and time picker instead.
2. I added an all day and repeat field so that the user does not have to input the same event constantly.
3. Some events can have multiple tags. For example, a Soccer game can be social and physical health so I updated the second version let the user select multiple tags.
1. Users suggested to add clearer statistics in regards to a work-life balance on the analytics screen. I added a breakdown of all the statistics in regards to the graphs so the user can click to reveal.
2. Labelling the navigation bar for accessibility was added.
3. The option to scroll between weeks and months was added on the analytics screen.
Final Designs
With my brand colours I used the golden ratio to inject my colours into my wireframes. I wanted to ensure that my screens seemed natural but also reflected my moodboard of being simple, lively, playful as well. I created my final UI prototype and developed an accompanying UI library that uses Brad’s Frost Atomic design system.
View Prototype
Design Features
Feature 1: Setting Weekly Goals
When interviewing young professionals about their preferred activities to balance a busy work schedule, three major themes developed - physical activity, social connection and self-care. With balancekeepr, users begin by setting their weekly goals for each of these major categories. The app takes the approach of setting personal life goals to emphasize that the focus of the app is to develop healthy habits that improve and prioritize the user's life activities.
Feature 2: Create, manage and edit work and life events
After setting goals, users input their schedules in the app by creating events. Then, users categorize these events as "work" or "personal", which is also colour coordinated to give simple visual cues. Within personal, users also sub-categorize the event to match their event to one of the three major themes to allow for tracking against goals.
Feature 3: Viewing Analytics
Another key finding from my interviews indicated that convenience is key. By providing users with a combined view of their work and life schedules it reduces the need to go between different platforms. The colour coordinated calendar also makes it easy to differentiate between scheduled work events and scheduled life events.
Feature 4: Viewing Analytics
Interviewees indicated they were in the dark about how their work-life balance changes from week to week. This features of balancekeepr makes it easy for users to track their performance by providing a summary or daily and weekly analytics that track for progress against goals, and makes comparing day vs. day and week vs. week performance to track overall improvement trends.
balancekeepr on iPadOS
As the foundations for an iOS mobile app are already in place, designing and developing an iPad app would be more efficient than creating a desktop/mobile web app. It was important for me to ensure my app was responsive to other devices such as the Ipad so users don’t feel limited to just their phones.
What's next for balancekeepr?
More user testing to ensure users are having a great experience! Then based on the user feedback, balancekeepr can expect to see some updates.
Google and Outlook calendar integration.
Being able to send calendar invites to people included in your event.
Key Learnings
First was to trust the process. My sketches to my final prototype have similarities but definitely don’t look the exact same and thats ok. Through user testing there were some navigation features that I thought made sense but it didn’t to the user and with those tweaks it just made my app better.
Secondly, before starting this project I had initial ideas of what my app was going to be but with secondary and primary research my idea ended up on a different direction. And made me realize that maybe those initial ideas might not be the correct design solution.
If you made it this far...
Thank you for taking the time to read this through!
Let's have a chat about it! :)
