Timeline
September 2020 - March 2021 (6 months)
My Role
UX Researcher / UX Designer / Visual Designer
Solo student project for Springboard UI/UX Bootcamp
Guided by mentor Earl Friedberg
PROBLEM
How to become a goal-getter: A story about overcoming obstacles and achieving your dreams!
Like any good story, we must start at the beginning...
“Did you know that a staggering 92 percent of people that set New Year's goals never actually achieve them?” - University of Scranton
Making a bucket list is really hard! In the day and age of Instagram and Pinterest, it’s hard not to be a dreamer. How many times have you heard?
“That influencer soaking in a rose petal bath in Bali really has it made right? Man, I want to do that one day - that’s definitely on my bucket list!”
But, it’s harder to follow through than you’d think.
This is definitely a passion project for me because I’m proud to consider myself in the 8 percent who has followed through on too many bucket list items to count. A few years ago, I spent a full year backpacking around 46 different countries - and 6 different continents!
It was by far the biggest challenge I had ever faced. I found that it takes a lot of planning, sacrifice, research, and time to be able to check that many items off in a short period of time. It was my biggest accomplishment, and also by far the most rewarding and life-changing experience of my life. I want to share that incredible feeling of achieving your bucket list goals with others. It was this sentiment that led me to explore this problem space and try to create a solution for it.
THE SOLUTION
Make the process of creating a bucket list a fun, easy and stress-free experience
It’s time to introduce you to the protagonist of this story.
Meet Tanya.
She’s in her mid 20s, has a demanding 9-5 job and feels like her 20s are just flying by her!
Of course she wants to travel to Machu Picchu, Skydive above the Palm in Dubai and take scuba lessons at the Great Barrier Reef,
But how on earth is she going to have the time, money and energy to plan and execute any of that?
Her underpaid salary almost all goes to overpriced food and rent in NYC, she works long hours and weekends and by the time she gets home she just wants some sleep!
Not to mention she has too many goals to keep track of! I mean, the girl can’t even remember what she had for dinner last night, how is she supposed to keep track of all her goals and dreams?
The very thought of this is overwhelming for her, she she’d rather just stay in the rat race and comfort herself by saying they will happen “someday” when the time is right...
Well, hopefully that’s where I can help.
What i’m hearing is that she needs something easy and effective to help her keep track of her goals, but I definitely need more information before I can come up with a solution to this problem.
Let’s see if we can find a way to get this girl to Machu Picchu, shall we?
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
The current competitors are extremely complicated.
While there are only a few bucket list based apps currently on the market, none of them solve the problem I am trying to fix. All three platforms were not easy to use or navigate through.
Woovly is a social media platform disguised as a bucket list app. Product promotions filled the majority of my newsfeed.
iWish had no ability to search for an item and major navigation issues. There was no way to add a personalized item, as well.
Soon had a very limited variety of categories to choose from. It primarily focuses on movies, tv series, books, and music - but if you wanted to add experiences or travel-related items, it’s not the app for you.
SCREENER SURVEYS & INTERVIEWS
My interviewees weren’t prioritizing their goals and had NO accountability!
I created a screener survey using Google Forms to send out to potential interviewees, so that I could specifically target ambitious, goal-oriented people. After going through my screener survey data, I conducted interviews with the 5 best candidates for my study.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
Where do you find inspiration to add items to your bucket list?
What keeps you motivated to check things off your bucket list?
When you complete an item on your bucket list, do you share this achievement with others? How?
All participants seemed very motivated to accomplish their goals and dreams, yet not many of them translated that into action. Clearly, there were some common concerns that needed sifting through.
No Accountability
When I asked my participants if they had found a way to
physically keep track of their bucket list that worked well,
most of them said no, but they wished they had.
No Prioritization
The second, and deeper issue that I uncovered talking to my
participants was: They weren’t prioritizing their goals!
THE MAIN INSIGHT
My interviewees were completely OVERWHELMED.
To help me make sense of all of this data, I started with an Affinity Map. It allowed me to find some common themes in my research and get to the meat of the problem. Based on the trends in my affinity map, I noticed that my participants made a lot of, for a lack of a better word, excuses, for why they were not achieving their goals.
Most of them blamed their lack of achievement on not having enough money, but let's be honest, if you really want something bad enough, you’d sell your left arm to get it.
After chatting for a while, they finally came to that conclusion themselves. So what was really getting in the way?
BEING OVERWHELMED
This allowed me to understand how my potential users FEEL and I was then able to construct an empathy map to visualize that.
So now we have the whole picture! Tanya needs something easy, effective and fun to help her keep track of and achieve her goals. It can't seem like a chore or be overwhelming in any way. It should be light and fun with motivational elements along the way.
SITE MAP & USER FLOW
Keep it simple, stupid.
Now that I knew what I was working towards, I began to construct a site map. I knew this app had to be very simple, not too many pages or complicated elements.
SKETCHING
After playing with a few navigation styles, I designed a cleaner, more minimal design, inspired by Instagram.
Initial sketches were for mobile, with the intention of adapting for the web later.
The challenge quickly became balancing personalization with inspiration: allowing users to customize and personalize their bucket list and items to their liking, while at the same time providing enough inspirational and engaging ideas to inspire users to keep adding more.
GUERILLA USABILITY TESTING & A NEW DIRECTION
Rewards-based to re-thinking the solution
At first, I designed a reward-based platform, where users could earn badges and points for completed bucket list items. The idea was the more items users completed, the more amazon gift cards or cash prizes a user could get - to keep them motivated to continue accomplishing their goals.
I quickly realized that I was trying to create something stress-free and NOT complicated, so I decided to get rid of that feature. I didn’t want my users to feel any kind of pressure - this was supposed to be fun and easy!
I asked five friends and family members specific questions about how they would use the product I sketched up, which led to some important discoveries.
Participants preferred the navigation to be more minimalistic - no need for hamburger menu and bottom navigation bar
Of two “Manually Add Item” page designs, most people preferred the box input text version over the line input text version
Participants wanted a slightly different layout for the category pages, so it is not to be confused with the discover page
Now that I’ve got some good feedback, time to have some fun with Figma!
LOW FIDELITY WIREFLOW
I translated my sketches into some lo-fi wireframes in Figma, focusing on the main flow of discovering a new item to add to the bucket list and manually adding an item if it is not in the discover section.
Now that I’ve got the structure all set, it’s time to make it pretty and polished!
VISUAL DESIGN
Enticing visual elements and color
The images should make the user feel inspired to go on their next adventure!
I wanted the UI to be light and not overwhelming or dark because a brighter simple UI will help the experience feel less complicated.
Rounded corners and subtle use of drop shadow feel appropriate and a simple color palette allows the user’s attention to be drawn to and inspired by the images.
Color Palette
Our color palette focuses on many shades of blue because blue is associated with excitement and strength.
Logo
First of all, I chose the name “Bucketlister” to be the brand name. It is a combination of “bucketlist” and “A-lister.” It is meant to give users the empowering feeling of being able to achieve their goals and dreams.
Our logo represents adventure, excitement and achieving your goals. I chose a mountain ridge because “climbing to the peak of a mountain” is commonly associated with achieving your goals.
Mountain climbing is also considered an “adventurous” activity, so I feel it represents our brand well.
TESTING + IMPROVEMENTS
5 major improvements in my design
Based on various feedback from 2 rounds of usability testing sessions and mentor feedback, I continually iterated my design over the span of 4 weeks - with 5 major improvements:
I added a “home” floating action button to all of the pages that were difficult to navigate home from
I added whitespace between the top navigation bar and thumbnails
I changed the “back” arrow to a more uniformed “back” arrow icon
I made the “Mark as Completed” button was more noticeable by enlarging the text and bolding the word “Completed”
I changed the imagery to make the user feel more excited and accomplished after adding an item to their list
I changed the wording completed to something more straightforward and to the point
I changed the “x” on the pop-up to an icon “x” instead of the letter
I added a pencil icon to the cover picture on the “My Bucketlist” page to show that it can be edited
I made the “To Do List” tab bolder and added more of a drop shadow than the other tab to show which one the user is on
I added the ability to personalize the description and image on items found through the “discover” page - shown by the pencil icon
THE FINAL SCREENS
The Final Product
Feel free to check out my full prototype on Figma!
Or see it in action right here:
CONCLUSION + LESSONS LEARNED
Main takeaways and areas of improvement
This was my first-ever UI/UX project and I had a lot to learn! I’m immensely grateful to have been through an entire UX process so I can see what it’s actually like. This was a passion project of mine, so of course it meant a lot to me. I learned so much from this experience that I will take with me through my future design endeavors, with the most important points being:
Don’t get too attached - Just because you though of A SOLUTION, doesn’t mean it’s THE BEST SOLUTION. I had to change directions a few times throughout this experience to go where the feedback led me - and that’s okay.
Research is SO important - I went into this project thinking I would have a solution right out of the gate, because I was an example of success for this problem, but research is what led me to the right solution. I won’t let my personal biases and assumptions get in the way at all next time!
Keep digging! - Sometimes (actually - a lot of the time) people say things that they don’t actually mean. I could’ve taken what my participants said at face value - but then I wouldn’t have uncovered the deeper problems that they didn’t even realize was the culprit to their lack of success!
