Background
Icare was thought up as an answer to an ever growing opioid epidemic in the US, I wanted to come up with a way to fund addiction recovery that involved local communities. The crowdfunding solution was chose because it addresses the most important issue that people face when dealing with addiction, funding for treatment. I believe that this solution will bring awareness to the opioid epidemic while promoting a social support group and raising funds for those who aren't able to afford treatment on their own. While funding for treatment is the core barrier addicts face, I believe by adding a social support aspect to the platform will help to fill a void in currently offered solutions. The target audience are those suffering from addiction as well as their communities who could act as a support channel for treatment. On this project I took on the role of project manager and worked with three other classmates to come up with this application.
Interviews
At the discovery phase of my project, we conducted user interviews in order to get a better understanding of the problem. We interviewed current addicts, recovered addicts and treatment center staff.
We chose to do interviews because no one in our team had dealt with drug addiction on a first hand basis and we felt our design choices should be heavily weighted in actual information from intended users. We interviewed ten individuals while keeping identifying information anonymous in the initial interviews with the intention of interviewing more before taking this application public. The interview questions were not set in stone and were different depending on the position of the person being interviewed. The main takeaway from the interviews conducted is that community is a huge component when it comes to addiction recovery, without a support circle addicts are almost certain to relapse.
User Testing
Before launching the product, we did our first round of testing in order to reveal possible usability problems.
With testing we were looking to find out the general feeling of the application as well as any errors that might be present in the design. We chose test subjects randomly from those walking around I.U.P.U.I's campus and potential users, testing was done in a closed moderated session. We chose a moderated test so that the information gathered from the test was consistent across all testing sessions. The major insights we gained from this testing were:
- Redundant Screens
- Inconsistencies in style
- Wording used was too technical for an average user
- App navigation errors
After testing we used those insights to remove screens that were redundant, changed wording throughout the application, corrected navigation errors and compared each section to one another to have a consistent style across the application. Our next iteration of this application can be seen below and would lead to another round of testing to further iterate our design.
Post Mortem
Of any projects I have been a part of in UX/UI this is the one that fills me with the most sense of accomplishment. I believe this application addresses a real problem in our country and around the world and that if this application was brought to market would have the biggest impact on society. I understand the ability technology has to bring together two different worlds as one and help both strive and believe we owe it to our fellow human to do just that. Working on this team with this project was very rewarding on two levels, one it helped to understand the different opinions, ideas and biases that individuals carry with them, two it helped me to understand what exactly I want my role to be in a UX/UI team and in this career field as a whole. Taking on the role of project manager gave me a sense of importance that I think we all kind of want, being able to delegate work and bring team members together on a single idea and seeing the end result filled me with a sense of accomplishment.
