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phaseI
The app that we are creating throughout this project is Sunlight Before Screentime. This app will ensure that people get up and outside before opening their phone. It has been proven in several studies that getting 15 minutes of sunlight within the first hour of waking up is great for mental health and sleep quality. During this first sprint, our primary goal was to do some research of our competitors to figure out what good or bad qualities we could take away from them in order to improve our own concept.
The primary methods that we used during this sprint for market research were a competitive analysis and a heuristic evaluation of a competitor. For the Competitive Analysis, we analyzed 3 separate apps that all had similar concepts and functions to our product. The apps that we found to analyze were: “Alarmy”, “Sunlight Alarm”, and “Touch Grass”. These are all apps that have similar features to our app and showcase different strengths and weaknesses that we took away from. We also looked at the overall quality of the products and the cost of the apps to see what our idea would be worth to other people. The heuristic analysis took this competitive analysis a step further, we analyzed one app in greater detail. This was supposed to be one of the apps from our competitive analysis but we found a better option at the time, the app we analyzed for this was “Bright Start: Morning Sunlight”. This app is very similar to the app that we are creating, it has the exact same goal but we were able to critique it and analyze what good and bad features it has in order to see how we should change our concept or improve upon this app. We analyzed the app using the “Neilson’s 10 Usability Heuristics” set. After individually analyzing the app using this heuristic set, we compared each team member’s analysis with one another and came to conclusions on how we could improve our app to make it better than the competitor.
Through our competitive analysis, we discovered several things that we should include in our app based on the weaknesses of others. These include: a way to get out of the locked state of your phone, a way to bypass the alarm if needed, user customizability in case of different living conditions, and allowing the user to set several alarms based on how they want to use the app. Most of the qualities on the heuristic set did not get rated very well, but through our analysis we discovered several things that we had not previously thought about that will help shape our own app. These include: making sure the UI is scaled properly for different devices, making sure the app is easy to set up and understand for new users, and making sure text makes sense for users. These were all things that we struggled with when using the competitor’s app and we plan on ensuring that it is better when it comes to our own app.
The primary outcome of our research is that we need to make our app very accessible. Users shouldn’t be struggling to set a timer due to the UI being messed up, users shouldn’t be completely locked out of their phone and unable to do anything, and users should be able to use the app in whatever way they want or need to. We need to add customizability in several aspects of the app; users should be able to choose when timers are set, what different timers do, what apps they lock themselves out of, how long they should be outside before unlocking, etc. Users should have nearly full control over how the app is used since it is primarily a lifestyle and self improvement tool.
Due to our team consisting of three novice UX researchers, there is a large chance we missed out on either good or bad qualities of certain apps when analyzing them. All of our findings are also entirely opinion oriented meaning that there is a high likelihood that other researchers would come to slightly different conclusions. We were not able to do any actual market research with users due to time constraints for this project.