Recenter, the Answer to Remote Work

We joined together for the first time to brainstorm ideas, when our group discussed about coronavirus and how it impacted us. Most of us had jobs that we had to leave physically and work from home or part time jobs that were quit entirely. This allowed us to come to the consensus that we needed a prototype that could help assist the transition from personal to remote work. After reviewing some research we decided to design an app that would help office workers in staying productive as well as keeping up with physical health, especially productivity because we found that once work shifted to remote most were both distracted with people or devices at home and reported that they were less high-yielding in results. Most of our insight on the project came from the sketching where we decided to incorporate a watch function, which could track exercise. From the critique from our classmates we decided to simplify the watch to serve as a simple reminder. Another insight that was developed from the sketching was adding on a vulnerable space, where users would feel comfortable with breathing exercises for stress and be able to speak or text with a professional psychologist. Some critique we encountered was how comfortable a user would be with a professional so we decided to add some descriptions and functions where the user would slowly enjoy talking to psychologist whether it was structured or unstructured discussion. These developments lead to our final prototype.

The design process for our prototype was an essential for our group. This led us to join forces together in order to implement our ideas. At the same time we decided to split tasks up in order to complete certain checkpoints. By dividing and conquering we were able to combine two prototypes from our sketches and create our prototype, Recenter. From our sketches we all had different ideas that we felt were necessary to incorporate, a bracelet sketch quickly changed to a watch. Also we felt like the original app idea was too vague and decided to ask the user what mood they were in, in order to evaluate what type of exercises and breathing techniques the app would lead to. While it was decided that the watch would have a simple slide feature, the app was a bit more complex where the user would navigate throughout the app in order to relieve stress and be able to focus on their workload. Some research we looked at was the apple watch where we decided that some watch features were necessary while others were not. Also for the app we looked at Headspace, Strava, and Promodoro which were other apps that were for focus, relieving anxiety, exercise, and a simple alert timer. We accounted for their different weakness and assessed different solutions that our prototype tried to solve.