UNITY: SENIOR PROJECT
The Smartwatch of the Future
WHAT IS UNITY?
The Unity Watch is an innovative smartwatch of the future that combines aspects of its competitors into the ultimate smartwatch experience. Users of the Unity Watch are able to create their own user profile which they can share with their friends and community, track their health data, call and text, listen to music, check the weather, and even view data from their watch as a hologram! User privacy is also an important part of Unity, therefore we’ve ensured that privacy features are available for our users and all data is encrypted and secure.
HOW DID WE MAKE UNITY?
The class we made Unity for was our Senior Project class which was meant to be a refresher on Goal-Directed Design before we graduate. Because of this, we did the steps that come along with this process but in our own way with much less of a formal class structure.
RESEARCH
User Research and Competitive Analysis
MODELING
Creating Personas
REQUIREMENTS
Deciding Important Features
FRAMEWORK
Wireframing and Prototyping
RESEARCH PHASE
The research phase of this project was not required in this class but, my team decided to do it anyway. We wanted to make sure we had a good foundation to build the rest of our project. We completed the competitive audit and literature review. After this, we created our list of questions for user testing as you can see below.
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We created our questions by trying to get the basic information to create our personas later on in the semester. We also wanted to make sure that we got the opinions of our interviewees' on the aesthetics and outward appearance of the watch. We then each did an interview and took notes on it. We did some affinity mapping in order to put our thoughts together and to make persona and wireframe creations easier.
MODELING PHASE
Creating the personas was an easy process for us because our interviews just so happened to break up perfectly into two different people. Our primary persona is Kai Jefferson, a 25-year-old young professional and student who prioritizes simple design and easy access to communication tools. She aligned with three of our five original interviewees' answers to our questions. Chad Berkely is our secondary persona. He is a 50-year-old fitness instructor who cares a lot about health tracking apps and keeping his data secure.
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With these two people in mind, we continue onto the refinement portion of creating Unity!
REFINEMENT PHASE
During the requirements phase, we pinpointed what our users really wanted, after our first round of user interviews we learned that our users would like a profile page to showcase who they are as a person in their community. We wanted to make this as inclusive as possible so we made having personal pronouns requirement during this phase. We also wanted the user to be able to edit that page. Another requirement for our prototype was a settings page that allows the user to choose their personal watch settings. We also included how secure the user wanted the watch to be. Another requirement were understandable icons. The final requirement was that we wanted our users to be able to communicate with their friends as well as add people in their contacts. Once we created this list of requirements, we proceeded to create our prototype for our users to test.
FRAMEWORK PHASE
In the framework phase, we created the wireframe, which you can see below. We created the wireframe in Miro to keep it with everything else we had already created for the project. We created the screens by starting with what we had learned our interviewees wanted to see and then added a few more screens we thought would be useful and some that are common in other smartwatches.
Refinement
With the wireframe created, we went to draft our high-fidelity prototype. We created this in Figma by working together to decide the onboarding process and then breaking up different parts of the app per person. The method of breaking the prototype into chunks ended up being very helpful because we only has a few weeks left of the semester to finish the whole watch. And now, we have our final version of Unity! Click the button below to see our full prototype. Thank you for checking this out!
