These were the User Personas that were generated based on all the interviews and research I conducted in addition to the research I received from Katie.
Persona 1
Persona 2
• Finds it challenging to find a sponsor who is a good match based on personality and life experience.
• Being a newcomer to AA she is hesitant and nervous about attending meetings in person and would prefer a more private, safe, and confidential environment.
Based on the research and personas the two major pain points existing in the industry that I needed to address in the app were:
1. Recovering alcoholics find it challenging to find a sponsor who is an excellent match — based on personality and life experience. This results in not the most effective recovery process possible.
2. Newcomers to alcohol recovery are hesitant to attend AA meetings and other in person events as they would prefer complete privacy/secrecy in regards to their alcohol addiction.
These were the user stories I created from the goals and frustrations present in the user personas.
1. As Sarah I want to find a sponsor who shares a history of depression and anxiety with me and who I have chemistry with, so I can have the most effective recovery program.
2. As Jeff, I am ashamed/embarrassed of my alcoholism and want my addiction to be kept entirely anonymous, private, and confidential, so that there is no way of someone I don’t want knowing about my addiction to find out.
Design an app with an effective on-boarding process (algorithm matching functionality) that facilitates a competent match, as well as an intuitive and goal driven in-app user experience that helps keep users on track to sobriety.
1. Onboarding — This was the most vital feature of the entire app as everything to do with the app depended on this feature alone. This is where all information regarding who the user is and what they are looking for is inputted. This feature determines the algorithm that connects the user with a suitable match, the core purpose of the app.
2. Chat feature — This was the second most vital feature of the entire app as in order for a match to be carried out seamlessly, communication between users was absolutely essential. The ability to chat with your match is the biggest factor in someones road to alcohol recovery.
3. Requesting sponsorship — This was another key feature that had to be incorporated in the app. Once the user enters the app after the onboarding screens they are given all matches who they can then begin communicating with. Once they decide they like a certain match they can request sponsorship and if the other user accepts then they are now sponsee-sponsor.
4. Resources/tools page — This was another key feature because the core goal of the app is to help the user on their way to reach/maintain sobriety and providing sobriety resources and tools facilitated this functionality.
Drawing from my findings in my research, I discovered that when potential users arrive at AA meetings, they want the environment they are in to embody all the characteristics listed above. I reckoned that when users arrive on an alcoholic recovery/support app or website, they would like to feel as if the app/website has these same characteristics as well. I decided to keep these adjectives at the forefront of my design process.
Colours
When visiting The CAMH website I noticed the primary colour was purple. This struck me as an effective design as purple is associated with mental health and wellness. It was hence fitting to use purple in my design as there is a strong correlation between mental health and alcoholism. Furthermore, purple is a calming colour that is gender neutral. CAMH: The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health features a lot of purple due to it being a soothing colour.
Space
I wanted to have a clean and clear interface to promote relaxation and tranquility. Understanding that people struggling with alcoholism can get easily overwhelmed, I wanted to create an interface with the greatest ease of use, and minimize convolution and confusion as much as possible.
One round of mid-fi testing was done with 7 different participants.
Problem 1: Users weren’t clear on the resources icon, they thought it was a schedule of some sort (middle icon). There was also no labelling which made most of the icons fairly ambiguous. When asked to chat with a mentor users clicked on the chat forum menu (very right) instead on the mentor chat menu (second from the left)
Solution 1: Resources icon was changed to an icon much more commonly associated with resources menu. Labels were added. The chat forum page was removed entirely (for various reasons) and the mentor chat menu icon was changed to the standard chat icon.
Problem 2: When viewing matches, users skipped past their matches’ bio paragraph as it was too wordy. The didn’t bother reading this paragraph.
Solution 2: Matches’ bios were removed completely from the matches page as it proved to be ineffective and also redundant.
Problem 3: Some users did not know that the matches overviews were tappable.
Solution 3: A chevron was added to indicate this.
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Problem 4: When asked to request sponsorship with an existing match users looked on the chat log page, however there was not a CTA for this functionality.
Solution 4: A request sponsorship CTA was added on this page.
I was able to create a well constructed design that addressed all the pain points existing in this industry I discovered in the research I conducted.
