JOEY

For this two week design sprint, I worked with the fabulous Jaycee Masucci to create a smart tv design that delivers digestible and useful content to make mornings enjoyable.

For many early risers, their mornings are stuck on repeat.

With set schedules and limited downtime in the morning, we wanted to leverage design to help users make the most of their mornings in an enjoyable and interactive manner.

Designing for an unfamiliar environment.

As our design was to leverage the capabilities of smart television technology inside our user's home, extensive research was conducted in order to best understand the limitations and considerations involved with the tech.

Understanding the tech

The AppleTV is an entertainment focused device that allows users to access a large assortment of applications, all through their personal television. AppleTV presented us with not just an unorthodox technology to design for, but allowed us to explore how we could design for environments beyond our mobile devices.

Going the distance

As users would be viewing our design at an average distance of 10 feet, we had to take into heavy consideration the accurate scaling of typography and interactive elements to keep usability consistent throughout our design. 

Remote based constraints

Because the AppleTV is a focus-based device and the remote is built to reflect that, we had to consider how to effectively design the way our users would navigate through our design using the limited gestures of the remote. The AppleTV remote allows a user to swipe and tap to navigate. As well, we had to consider the menu button also functioning as a "back" button, and pulling in the Play/Pause button as a trigger for specific in-application functions.

Learning what it takes to make a morning routine.

To better understand what sorts of activities our users were doing during their mornings, we conducted a user survey of 41 people that were practicing a consistent morning routine.

70%

Take 30–45 minutes or less

As our users routines were short and to the point, we had to focus on the limited points of downtime during a routine. 

Checking schedule, weather, and morning commute

Were the most common activites

However, we realized no two mornings are the same, so we had to consider the existence of a personalized onboarding setup for our design.

DESIGN CONSIDERATION

Designing for the downtime

Let's face it, morning routines are busy, and have limited opportunities for interaction with technology. Because of this, we designed in mind with targeting the time of waiting a user may have while waiting for their morning cup of coffee or tea to be ready.

Exploring digestible and understandable content through hi-fi wireframes.

Because of the short timespan of this project, we decided to  go straight into rapidly producing high-fi wireframes in order to better learn the potential gaps between our designs and the overall goal of our project.

WIREFRAME LEARNINGS

Too in-depth

After our first round of wireframes, we realized that our designs were much too complex for a morning routine application. We decided to tweak our designs to rely on expandable, card-based content. 

Companion based approach

When looking at our wireframes, we felt that they had a cold nature to them. Because we wanted our user to feel motivated and energized for their morning, we decided to implement an amiable and fun companion into our design.

Meet Joey!

A personalized daily summary to help users start their mornings off right.

After working through the kinks of our wireframes, we set to designing an effective solution to our purpose and research.

Real-time Information Cards

The morning summary is populated by real-time, up-to-date information cards displaying digestible and glanceable content about the day. A user can then tap into the card to expand it into a full-screen experience.

Friendly updates and details

As a user swipes through their morning summary, Joey provides them with friendly, conversational updates about their day, as well as some general information that would be important to the user.

Visually Responsive Illustrations

To give the user another level of connection to Joey, we made our illustrations visually responsive to the news Joey is delivering, adding another layer of personality into our project while still maintaining our informative tone.

Joe To-Go

As consistent as mornings may be, there's always the chance of a wrench in our plans. With this in mind, we designed a mobile flow that allowed a users morning summary to be sent directly to their phone, allowing an on-the-go experience (PS, the car is called the Joeyota Camry).

FINAL DESIGNS

Designing a cohesive application at a rapid, sprint pace was a nice change of pace.

As my first experience with a project sprint, Jaycee and I were forced to think on our feet and come up with practical and realistic solutions in a timely manner. Moving forward, we want to dive into the onboarding flow of the application, as well as how a user would add sections to their morning summary through the application.