Design Brief
To discover new kinds of interactions that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can have in homes as they increasingly become more prevalent in homes. Specifically narrowing problems within the household and designing solutions that AI can solve and/or improve.
Background
The conclusive design solution introduces Consona, a home AI system with an allied smartphone app which tracks and analyses a user's scheduled lifestyle and generates suitable recommendations to restore balance between factors of work and life.
Problem
How to maintain a healthy balance between work and lifestyle at home.
Features
Design Process
Within this project, the implementation of the Design Thinking Process has been applied to ensure a user based solution that will be reliable, consistent and rational. This has further allowed our team to create a system that is meaningful and fulfils the design brief at each stage.
Prototyping and Testing
Rapidly creating low-fidelity paper prototypes allowed us to explore solutions into our defined design problem. Gaining insights into users feedback, wireframes were created to visualise the concept in a more detailed representation of actions: inputs, outputs and processes of the system and user.
The Final Design
Our evaluation has directed our draft concepts to an integrated solution that effectively addresses the design brief. Through the formative processes of prototyping and user testing, we have developed an innovative and technological concept that solves the issue of work-life spillover.
The decision to focus on infographics, scheduling and recommendation of tasks provides the users needs of flexibility, personalisation and fluidity.
Mobile Prototype
A critical design decision arose, involving the user flow of the app. With feedback from user’s and class tutors the Balance Overview graph was changed to become the home screen, subsequently swapping app positions with the calendar. A Progress Overview screen, which displays the user’s accomplishments of tasks was added for more in-depth user analysis. This achieved the main goal of the app, to provide constant visibility of a user’s work/life balance progress.
The use of the software, Sketch, provided useful tools to create the wireframes and mockups. Proto.io was used to successfully create the high-fidelity prototype functions and fluidity as we envisioned.
The vibrant colour variation of coral and greys ensured a consistent and clean design throughout the app.
Reflection
Adhering to user feedback, the concept Consona was deemed the best option viable to preventing and solving work-life spillover at home.
It continues to work in the direction of fulfilling our primary objectives with the need for a few minor alterations and improvements in the user flow and app appearance. Constant user feedback throughout the later design processes resulted in identifying weaknesses early. This allowed our team to overcome these obstacles and improve the overall functionality of the system.
Group Members:
Sonia White, Katrina Tsoukalas & Jaimii Jakab
Sonia White, Katrina Tsoukalas & Jaimii Jakab
