The BreakTaker

Creating an MVP App for an iOS System motivating you in a playful way to take regular breaks in your work routine

The Task

For our second last project at the IronHack UX/UI course we were challenged with creating a wellness app for the “client” National Wellness Institute which is lately encountering problems catching up with technology.

As a result, they’ve organized a competition for designers to create an app which will help people to adopt and commit to a health-improving routine. The prototype needed to consist of:

  • the user flow for the main feature of the app

  • a way for users to set up a profile with information relevant to their goals

  • a way for users to set goals and track their progress

  • a user interface which reflects a new, fresh, updated image

Role:

User Researcher, User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) Designer role shared with my teammate, Andreja.

Tools:

Figma, Figjam, Photoshop, GoogleForms

Time:

9 days

The Idea

Came to my head when I decided to take a short break after spending 5 hours in a row in front of my computer. We were about to look for a subject for this app but I was simply too tired to do it, so I laid down to rest for 10 minutes. In the moment I put my head on my pillow, the idea came up to my mind by itself:

Let’s make an app which will motivate people stuck in home office to take regular, short breaks. And let’s create it in a way it’s not only useful, but also fun!

01 - Research

Market Research

There are already some apps for taking breaks, but it occurred that most of the competitors have based their apps on simple timers. This was the point where I thought that in order to make our app extraordinary we should give the user the feeling of playfulness, and create an additional motivating factor, which will be the BreakTaker community support.

User Research | Survey (80 participants)

For the quantitative data from our users, we conducted a survey among 80 participants aged 18 to 60. Among them:

User Research | Interviews (5 participants)

In order to support previous data, we also conducted interviews among 5 potential users to get qualitative data.

  • Because of the constant work I have a back pain, it affects my appetite and digestive system. I feel more tired in the long term and get quickly overwhelmed.

  • Sometimes, I’m too concentrated on work to notice that I’m tired.

  • Maybe the problem is not how many breaks I have but the quality of them.

Furthermore, the results of our survey and the interviews showed that the problem lies not in a lack of awareness, but rather in a lack of habit and too much fixation on work, so that it is easy to overlook the signals sent by our bodies.

02 - Our Persona

Occupied Olivia

Olivia is an ambitious market specialist in her 30’s, working mostly from home. She cares about her well-being, but on her regular days she usually just manages to make a few coffee breaks which doesn’t give her a lot of energy in the long run. She wants to build stronger relations with her colleagues, who she sees rarely and make sure that she has more power for her interests after work.

Goals

  • Being productive at work

  • Having more energy at the end of the day for her hobbies

  • Improving her work-life balance

  • Connecting with her colleagues even when working from home

Frustrations

  • Feeling tired after work

  • Spending too much time sitting

  • Being concerned about the negative impact of the prolonged sitting on her health

“Sorry, I have no time for a break now...”

03 - Problem Statement

Occupied home-office workers need to find a way to build a habit of taking regular short breaks, because they are concerned about the negative impact on their health and well-being caused by prolonged time spent in a fixed position when working.

04 - Designing the MVP of the BreakTaker

Ideation and the crazy 8’s

The ideation process helped deciding on MoSCoW — a list of basic features which our product must, should, could and won’t have and that was followed by the MVP Statement:

The goal of the app, at the bare minimum, is to empower occupied home-office workers to prioritise self-care and improve productivity by motivating them to take breaks at regular intervals throughout the workday.

With customisable preferences and progress tracking, users can build a habit of maintaining a healthy work-life balance by engaging in different activities. Users can also connect with their work colleagues, which has both social and motivating principles.

So what is the BreakTaker really about?

The app is based on a library of short, active, often funny break activities from which the user picks his favorite ones or creates new ones.

After building his break schedule, the user can then decide if he wants to pick the break activities by himself, or rather be surprised every day by the system or maybe by one of his colleagues. The motivating factor will be his community section, where he will submit his progress and the break-challenges.

05 - The Iteration

Lo-fi & mid-fi wireframes

I draw our lo-fi wireframes pretty quickly, because on the same day we wanted to conduct the first concept-testings. I went with the flow in which our Olivia has the first contact with our application, is able to adjust her own settings, picks her favourite break activities from the library, and accomplishes the first break activity task.

Concept testing

We really enjoyed empathising with occupied Olivia and helping her to build a habit of taking regular breaks while having fun at the same time. Luckily, we conducted 6 concept testings early enough, which uncovered the weak points of our app.

Before

After

06 - Final BreakTaker

Brand attributes and the moodboard

Before we started with our design, we turned the heads again into the direction of our competitors — not to repeat their trends, but rather to stand out on the market.

It occurred that most of them had a pretty monochrome and monotonous design. So the obvious direction for us, taking the playful and active site of the BreakTaker into consideration, brought us to the below brand attributes:

  • playful

  • active

  • sociable

  • colorful

Hi-fi wireframes

What was really important for me was to create the effect of playfulness and strong community support. Therefore, a lot of focus was put on creating a big library with really funny, active, but also meaningful activities.

An example of an activity:

Imagine you are Brad Pitt…

Pick your favorite actor/actress and a movie scene you like with him/her. Record yourself while mocking that scene. Submit the recording in the Challenge section in your Community Page.
Let the others guess who you were!

After picking your favorite ones, you can decide if the activities would be selected by yourself, by the system, or by your colleague. In our flow, we recommended to go with the buddy option, because it strengthens the effect of the community support and motivation. It also makes it feel more like a game, not like some additional task you have to add to your daily schedule.

Please, check out the prototype of the BreakTaker:

Next steps

Andreja and I were really happy with the outcome of our BreakTaker app. And, honestly, from so many users who have helped us with the testings we’ve heard the following:

I really would love to see your app on the market, because I truly would love to use it by myself! It’s so much fun!

Such positive feedback only motivated us further to plan the next steps for the BreakTaker:

  • while testing we discovered that some parts of our app would need slight changes in terms of accessibility and contrast, so that would be the first step we’d improve

  • we would love to keep expanding the library with the break activities and also let the community and the users create their own ones

  • we also want to make the community impact in our app to be even more visible, so we would like to grow this section and create more games between the buddies