We wrote down everything that entails New Year's Resolutions in the beginning of the project to get a good scope of the problem. After that Key Stakeholders were listed that influence people that set New Year's resolutions. Through this mapping we had a clear idea of who to interview for our research phase.

To start our research process we wanted to talk to many different stakeholders and experts. We talked to 5 University students (Target Group), a professor at the Wharton School of Business who specializes in habit forming (Subject Matter Expert), and Professional Athletes (Examples of people who are good at maintaining goals) and asked them questions regarding their struggles, motivation, and what works/doesn't work for them.

From these insights and the different people we talked to we created two different personas. These different personas are generalizations of the trends we saw in the interviewees and show the two outside cases that we talked to. When we grade our potential solution against both of these cases we could see if our solution actually works for all the people we talked to.

After making the personas we looked at habit tracking apps that our interviewees currently already use. We analyzed all of them and looked where they were successful and unsuccesful and how our solution could use their examples.

Concluding the Research & Insights stage we developed a How Might We (HMW Question) that was used for the start of our development phase.

Starting the concept development phase we did extensive ideation. We sketched 51 rough ideas based on the broad HMW and supported them by mapping them to insights from our wide range of interviews and projecting them onto our personas. Based on this we defined 5 MVP features that our app must have to succeed.

Using the mapped MVP features we developed several low fidelity wireframes which were tested with 8 different Target Group users. This gave us insights into many problems that our Lo-Fi concepts had which we could solve in our later versions

Different layouts, icons, colors, and processes were all tested with different users at different stages. In total 25 different people tested different stages of our app of development. This constant feedback allowed us to fail fast and iterate much. Below you can see how our wire frames transitioned from our Lo-Fi model to our final concept. Furthermore the clear change in Style Guide to strike a more friendly tone can be clearly seen.

Furthermore, since the main interaction point of the app would be a robot called Berry (Berry the Booster Bot) we put a lot of effort in shaping his look & feel. Clear progression from a neutral robot icon to a friendly helper can be clearly seen.

Using the Research & Insights, Idea Development, Constant Testing and Refining we finalized our New Year's Resolution App Fresh Start. The app would give personalized & tailored advice based on the user's schedule, goals, and motivation.

Our personalized onboarding used a synchronization to the users calendar to find out when the user actually had time to work on their goal. Furthermore It talked through the specific goals that the user wants to hit and when they want to hit it. This chatting interaction, using Generative AI on the back-end, ensures that the onboarding feels smooth and natural for the user.

Supportive AI Check-ins make sure that the user gets reminded, in a gentle way, to spend time on their resolutions. However, it also allows for flexibility in planning and allows for the user to receive information to participate in their resolution better.

Through the onboarding the user receives tasks that are broken down into specific elements. The user can click them off when completed or always ask for more information through the floating button on the screen. Furthermore Berry is always there in the corner to encourage the user with what they are doing.

Every user likes to see their own progress but sometimes it is hard to do that when you are constantly seeing yourself change. Therefore our progress tracking tab lets the user track achievements with engaging but straightforward visuals. Even here, in the progress tab, Berry is always there to help the user out with any questions they might have.

Finally we understand that opening the app is already a task that the user might not want to do. Because of that we designed widgets that can remind the user on the home screen regarding the task that needs to be done. Furthermore Berry is also here on the widget to give you encouragement to do your task. Different facial expressions that can be seen in the Style Guide can encourage the user even more to do their resolution.

Overall our final design was tested with 8 users and all of them approved of the different features that were used. Users said things along the line of "I like how it's trying to gamify resolutions without it feeling gimmicky or childish". Other users said that they liked the constant feedback and especially Berry stood out to them as they said that the expressions of the "cute bot" could persuade them to do their task