Creative Mindfulness Architecture Design

For our project, we were curious to see how we could encourage people (particularly busy students) to incorporate creative practices into their daily lives. From our user research, baseline studies, and intervention studies, we are planning to develop a solution that incorporates friend networks to engage accountability, celebration, and collaboration into a creativity mindfulness app.

System Path

For the average user of our solution, a persona named “Normal Nelson”, we illustrate the paths Nelson could take to log into and use our solution and it’s different systems:

Bubble Map

With the system path model in mind, we can proceed with mapping out the multiple systems, processes, and goals of our solution into a bubble map:

Assumption Mapping

From here, we list the many assumptions about our users and our solution that we may need to test, evaluating their desirability, viability, and feasibility along with mapping them on a spectrum of importance and certainty. We have selected 2 of these assumptions to test and evaluate further. Link to Assumption Map

Assumption Experiments

1. “People want prompts from friends or the app”

• • # of participants: 3
  • We were asked during our lightning talk a lot about whether the prompts will come from the users themselves, their friends, strangers, or from the app. In our original intervention study, we acted like an accountability buddy who sent prompts to the user. For this mini experiment, we allow the user to try each one of the options. Day 1, we will send them a prompt (generated by the app). Day 2, we will send them a prompt from another user or perhaps one of their friends. Day 3, we will allow them to vote on prompts generated by all the users, and do the one that is most popular. Day 4, we will let them generate their own prompt. At the end of the experiment, we ask users which option they preferred the most.

2.  “All kinds of creative practices != the same. (user interest in drawing, vs. writing vs improv)”

• • # of participants: 5
  • Survey Form
  • We will run a 3-day survey that presents users with prompts of different mediums (eg, art, writing, photography), and ask them to choose what they would prefer to do. We will present a variation of this question several times to simulate prompts over the course of multiple days. We will also ask the user what their preferred creative medium of choice is, and see if that medium is reflected in their preferred prompts (or if they like diversity).

Note about reminders:

We thought about testing different types of reminders and anchors to see which one worked best in reminding our users to respond to their daily prompts. This would be hard to test based on the information we have about users, especially with action-based reminders (“We see you just finished class. It’s a great time to do your prompt!) and location-based reminders (“Welcome back home! How about taking some time to play the piano?”). This is something we’ll think about more in the future during the design of our solution, especially in terms of what information we would need to collect about our users if we want to implement those other types of reminders. We may also look into seeing how people currently use reminders on their phones (such as the Reminder app or alarms) to see how we can effectively prompt users by using types of reminders that they normally respond to.