Designing a Quit smoking app
Defining the Problem
Most people who smoke, started smoking when they were teenagers. Those who have friends and/or parents who smoke are more likely to get caught in the habit than those who don’t. Some teenagers say that they “just wanted to try it,” or they thought it was “cool” to smoke.
According to the 2014 Surgeon General’s Report (SGR), nearly 9 out of 10 adults who smoke started before age 18, and nearly all started by age 26. The report estimates that about 3 out of 4 high school smokers will become adult smokers — even if they intend to quit in a few years.
Why can’t they leave it?
The primary reason is what you might have guessed ”it is addictive”, which it all the more difficult to leave even after you intend to.
The surrogate tobacco industry’s ads, price breaks, and other promotions for its products are a big influence in our society. The tobacco industry spends billions of dollars each year to create and market ads that show smoking as exciting, glamorous, and attractive. Tobacco use is also shown in video games, web series, and on movies which is catered to audience as the sign of being modern and cool.
At times of New year, when most of the people resolve to quit smoking, the industries spend the highest portion of their ad expenditure, just to get into the mind of the people trying to quit and making it difficult for them to quit.
Current solution
I tried to understand why the current apps available are not able to solve the problem because the idea of an app helping you track your habits is not new and on opening Play store, we find there are hundreds of apps that should help you quit smoking.
- Most apps use US dollars as the currency and Indian Users cannot connect to the price, which lacks the motivation to convert every time.
- Most apps do not award you for completing your goals, which can be another source of motivation.
- Apps connect to complex health concepts of Blood pressure, Blood oxygen which is directly related but not easy to understand for laymen.
- Most apps connect with someone else to help you track, but as per my observation, People around us usually force us and wants the habit to go in a moment which irritates an already craving person and this tends to break the goal.
Proposed solution
How will my solution stand out?
The first idea was to improve the user experience, that is switching all the negative of the existing applications added a solution to my designs.
User flows is the best friend while designing a website or app to complete a task. It helps me determine how many screens are needed, what order they should appear in, and what components need to be present.
User Flow
After deciding on what to be designed, I always prefer sorting out my colors palette and typography to be clear and remove the options of reiterations. This brand guide takes the heart and soul of the brand — your mission, vision and values — and translates it into the design.
Taking small steps approach
A very complex application turns out to be easy to use with the simpler UI, to create a UI very simple, the need is to follow every step irrespective of the time.
- Wireframe
Wireframes always help me figure out what exactly I want on my canvas. It helps me connect the site’s information architecture to its visual design by showing paths between pages and Clarify consistent ways for displaying particular types of information on the user interface.
Visual Design
The final day where I have to complete the visual design as well prepare the descriptive journey through this design experience.
What I wanted to transmit in the app was something completely different from what the competitors are doing out there. After trying out the wireframe, I adjusted my color palette again. I thought of keeping a few points in mind always:
- Not very challenging
- Clean
- Minimum texts
I created a very goal-oriented design have UX that could make it stand out from the hundreds of apps already available on the play store, after multiple iterations I could carve this design out.
Key Takeaways
Thank you for staying with me and trying to understand my process. I have experienced myself when utilized properly technology and apps are here as tools to make our lives better, healthier and help us reach our goals and engaging UXs and pleasing UIs would make it simpler.
There is a lot more to explore and with the limiting time, I did very few screens, so a new aspect was to understand the most essential of the complete design.
- Without any time for user research and no knowledge about smoking, the details were difficult to find and time-consuming which I had already limited.
- The no user testing is keeping me worried about the results, I wish I had more time.
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