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Discovery Research,Concept Testing and Mid-Fi Prototyping of an Application for Internet Addiction 

@University of Trento

This is a UX Design Sprint project I led at my university for a use case of inclusive design, The high-level - Internet addicted people and be inclusive them, we hadn't decided on the product yet, so first we did a feasibility study, researched our environment and users, and after few stakeholder interviews came to a conclusion backed by secondary research to come up with a mobile application as the proposed solution that would be released across public community wifi for free.

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Overview

The high-level requirement of the project was to educate users about a phenomenon called internet addiction and provide them with the needed support and access to help. After a series of brainstorming sessions, we came up with the counteractive solution of providing an application that could be launched via public wifi which will help the users combat internet addiction. Fig1.1 shows a wireframe of the default Trentino wifi landing page through which we advertise our application as shown in Fig 2.1

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Fig 1.1 App Wireframe - Brainstorming Session outcome

* Prototype by Arthur Bandoli

Fig 1.2 App Hi-Fi Prototype 

Problem Statement

These were the issues we set out to solve: 

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  1. To create awareness about Internet addiction

  2. To assist Internet addicts to recover and rehabilitate

  3. To enable them to seek out various treatment procedures

  4. To provide a supportive community during their recovery journey

  5. To monitor and provide the user's feedback throughout the recovery process

Users and Audience

  • Users of the application will be a wide variety of people accessing Trentino Wifi 

  • Our primary target users are those who are addicted to the internet but aren't consciously aware of the same

  • Age-wise would be teenagers and adolescents

Roles and Responsibilities

I was the UX Researcher and one of the Designers,

I worked on Comparative analysis, Pitching our project to stakeholders and wireframing

Scope and Constraints

The timeline available was 4 (Four) Weeks, and within the limited period and budget, the available secondary research method was preferred to extensive evaluative research via usability studies.

Process 

The Process was a Five-step process:

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  1. State of art:

    • We did secondary user research via Literature Review and comparative analysis of products in the market for various use cases regarding Internet addiction.​

  2. Ideation:

    • After presenting to the stakeholders via Q and A we discussed the product solutions available and following a series of brainstorming sessions, we came up with the wireframe for an application that would be free of cost​

  3. Feasibility:

    • Though the solution seemed to be easy to implement there were several issues regarding the feasibility, as in means to keep the app running, Running cost - inclusive of server cost, data storage cost, etc.

    • we proposed a sponsorship model for the business and defined a list of resources we might require for the successful completion of the launch and maintenance 

  4. Design:

    • WI did a wireframe of the application with all the screens which was further converted to High Fidelity Prototype by one of our stakeholders in the UX team.​

  5. Financial and organizational aspects:

    • We came up with a variety of advertising strategies including Native ads, campaigns in public places, etc and one main source of investment was Provincial funds from Trento. 

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Fig 2.1 Onboarding User Flow Wireframe

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* Prototype by Arthur Bandoli

Fig 2.2 User Flow of the App Hi-Fi Prototype 

Key Design Impact

Our design solution to the aforesaid problem was to produce a counterintuitive mobile application to combat Internet addiction

The app has Four main screens for the app

  1. Descriptive analysis: Provides data about users' internet consumption and various other KPIs -Fig: 3.4

  2. Interaction with Intelligent Virtual Assistant: Where users can securely interact with an intelligent bot to handle queries regarding recovery and various other aspects Fig: 3.3

  3. News feed: News regarding events, employment, and other real-world events Fig 3.1

  4. Hyperlink to open-source communities: Links to navigate to community help Fig 3.2

 

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Services3.jpg
Virtual assitant.jpg
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Fig 3.1 News feed 

Fig 3.2 community 

activites links

Fig 3.3 Virtual Assistant

Fig 3.4 User Profile

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Fig 3.5 User Flow of navigation between the Four main features of the app

We made sure to validate with the help of the Five service accomplishments concept to provide an universal and inclusive design.

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Fig 3.6 Inclusive Design Five service accomplishments adaptation for Our application

For additional findings and learnings, please contact - preerampr@gmail.com.

My Learnings

  • measuring addiction using tangible factors: We could either design a questionnaire or an IVA interaction on a timely basis with the user based on IAT- Internet addiction test or DCT_IA-Diagnostic characteristics for Internet addiction by DCM5.​

  • Sponsors: Like any other public awareness campaign if this is also considered a significant issue we could raise funds to realize the project.​​

  • The fact that the application itself runs with the Internet: On contrary to any application existing in the market we could design a less persuasive design in terms of time spent through characteristics such as limiting the amount of content the user is exposed to in a day, etc.

*For more details about the project, please contact me

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