Accountabull

Overview

Problem: It’s easy to make commitments, but hard to follow through with them; especially when we are responsible for our own accountability.

Solution: This app empowers people to keep their commitments by giving someone they trust the responsibility of keeping them accountable, via evidence and incentives.

Timeframe: The work described below took around 3 months to complete.

My Role: I was the sole designer and researcher, in charge of managing three user research projects, brand identity design, and all UX & UI design work. My team included one primary full-stack developer, and we used contractors for certain roles such as logo design and back-end infrastructure development.

Tools:

• Whimsical – Wireframes

• Invision – Wireframe prototyping

• Figma – High-fidelity mock-ups & prototype

• Google Sheets – Analyzing quantitative user research data

NDA Disclaimer: There is some information that can't be shared until launch, around Q4 2020.

Early Market Validation

Before any designing began, the other co-founder and I entered a Tech Startup competition to validate the idea. We won 2nd place and came away with valuable research, so we decided to develop the app as a side-project, starting with the backend architecture (which was done by the development team). Once I began working full-time on this from September 2019, I designed the app's entire UX & UI from the ground up.

User Research Projects

I commissioned three independent research projects through the Riipen platform, which included:

• Two groups of undergraduate psychology students from the University of Toronto, who conducted surveys

• A master’s student from Queen’s University, who conducted both surveys and interviews

I explained to each group what I wanted to learn, and I managed the research over two semesters. This included a classroom visit, as well as email and video correspondence. A total of 255 participants were included, and 12 people were interviewed. Once the data was gathered, I analyzed it myself; and it was combined with our early market validation research (above) to create a user persona.

Users' Problem

Notably, in one of the studies I commissioned, 100% of 106 respondents reported having habits/skills they wish to develop, and 96% had bad habits they want to get rid of. However, relying on self-reports or the “honour system” simply doesn’t work well, which is why things like New Year’s Resolutions are notoriously unsuccessful.

Brand Identity

I began working with the other co-founder to establish our core values and what we stand for. Accountabull is meant to embody honesty, authenticity and ambition, while still being fun and social – not too "serious." With information like this (and many other branding decisions we made), I began exploring options for aesthetics. I experimented with colours depending on their associated meanings (purple for authenticity and ambition; yellow for an energetic feeling and friendliness, etc.).

Final Designs

Since the co-founder and I both like Smash Bros, I used the colourful characters from that video game to populate the app as if they were users. This made it engaging, and easy to contextualize the information.

Landing Page

I ended up making a design system while I completed the UI designs. This made it much easier to complete a landing page that actually communicates what we want to convey about our app, without sacrificing the early mailing list strategy.

Takeaways

What I learnt

• Thinking early about branding and UX is not a bad idea — Both disciplines depend on appealing to users, so doing user research early was not only useful for making design decisions, but also for determining marketing strategies.

• Don’t dwell on visual design in the beginning… you can change it later — Picking things like colours for an app is not to be taken lightly, but you shouldn’t dwell on it either. My strategy was to pick a palette that another app already uses; and once several screens had been designed, I experimented until I ended up with a palette that seemed to fit better with the brand.

My biggest challenge

As soon as I finished the wireframes, I attempted to create a design system to make things more scalable in the future. However, without having finished mock-ups to base important design decisions on, I struggled on how to even get started. Eventually I decided to just start designing the UI, until I had a sense of what elements would be included. Once around half of the UI was made, I was able to make the design system, which then made it much easier to make iterations that were consistent across the app and landing page.