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 My Research and Design Process

As a student of Indiana University, I accepted the IU's Grand Challenge on Responding to the Addictions Crisis. I decided to focus on Behavioral Addiction and according to my research:

• Behavioral addiction is constant engagement in a particular behavior without knowing the catastrophic outcome that affects other domains of life.

There are different kinds of Behavioral Addiction:

 Focusing on Social Media Addiction

Why Social Media addiction is challenging to address?

•Easy-access

•Lack of proper social media governance laws

•Many people are unaware of the effects of social media addiction

•Uncontrollable power and influence of social media

•Problematic Social Media Usage is not recognized as an addiction until recently

Harvard study on Social Media addiction

Why Students?

Target User Age Group

The target age group of students is 18 - 29.

Field Research

Observing Students:

I observed many individuals who are sitting alone, waiting in a queue, walking down the escalator, and also hanging out with a group of friends. The observed students mostly during lunch hours and evening hours on regular working days. The students whom we observed are 18 to 25 years old.

From these observations, I learned the behavior of people when they interact with social media. I also learned how people could use social media to avoid talking to others or kill time, even if it is for a short duration. I realized that people from different countries use different social media platforms, including international platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and local social media sites like Sina, Weibo. I realized that people frequently like to check the progress of the posts posted on social media, more than expected.

Semi-Structured Interview

• I conducted semi-structured interviews with Graduate and Undergraduate students on the IUPUI Campus to understand how and when these people turn to social media. Also, I attempted to understand how social media was affecting their studies, relationships with family and friends, etc.
  

• I understood that people have different personalities in real life than their social media personalities, and people are more inclined towards the latter. Social media addicts find that these apps are an escape from reality into a better space.
  I could obtain information about the addict's perspective regarding their usage and how they feel about it.
  

• We understood that social media addicts might sometimes realize their addiction and want to reduce the usage or avoid using it. Still, they keep falling back because of the lack of motivation or enough tools that help them.

Framing the problem statement:

Affinity Diagramming helps to gather critical insights and form a problem statement.

Problem Statement

How might we design computing technologies to deal with students of 18 -29 who are not aware of their social media addiction and the students who are already aware of their addiction?

 Categorizing users into two types:

 Empathizing with the target user

 Drawing out Scenarios

Sketching out the final concept - Prototype Stage

For the First Iteration of prototyping and user testing, I chose paper prototyping because it is a very flexible method. This method enabled me to drag the users away from the distraction of notifications on mobile screens while testing. Moreover, it helped me understand how the user navigated the application, and I was able to identify the confusion in the flow.

First Iteration: Pen Sketch

• While testing this paper prototypes, I discovered many problems with the design. At first, for the landing page, I designed some graphs where users can track their usage. Furthermore, the charts provided users with the option to drill down their usage.

• This idea didn't work well as I was overwhelmed with the data the application was pushing.

• Based on the experience with the design, I decided to make the interface clean and in multiple layers so that it becomes easy to understand.

Second Iteration: Wireframes

After that, for the second iteration, I used Balsamiq for making neat wireframes and then printed them to test them with the users. I included the key performance indicators in all the screens and made the interface look simple.

Final Iteration: High Fidelity Prototype

I created high-fidelity user interfaces using Adobe Illustrator.The reason I proceeded with Illustrator was the flexibility the tool provided me to design. To convert the mock-ups into prototypes, I used Adobe XD as transferring files between two apps was very easy.