Divequest — A UX Case Study

Introduction

In today’s fast paced world, many individuals struggle to find time and motivation to complete their bucket lists. With divequest, users can swim towards their dreams — one goal at a time. Divequest was created during a six-week design sprint under Design Interactive’s 2024 Spring Cohort at UC Davis. Our team conducted extensive user research and utilized human-centered approaches to design a platform that motivates and rewards users on their journey to make life more exciting and meaningful.

Responsibilities and Timeline

User Research

Research Methods and Techniques

In an effort to understand the motivations and decision-making processes behind how people curate and prioritize their bucket lists, we employed a mixed-methods approach that included literature reviews, surveys, interviews, and competitive analysis.

Our primary goals were to explore how individuals determine which items to add to their bucket list, the factors influencing the prioritization of these items, and the role of intrinsic motivations and aspirations.

1. Literature Reviews: We conducted preliminary research through literature reviews to inform our survey questions. This step helped us ground our study in existing knowledge and identify gaps that our research could address. After sending out our survey, we conducted additional literature reviews, amounting to a total of 12 sources.
2. Surveys: We designed and distributed a survey to over 75 participants. Our survey questions were crafted to gather quantitative data on the types of items people include in their bucket lists and the criteria they use for prioritization.
3. Interviews: To gain deeper insights, we conducted 10 in-depth interviews (2–3 interviews per team member). These interviews allowed us to explore personal stories and motivations in more detail.
4. Competitive Analysis: Based on the survey responses and interview insights, we conducted a competitive analysis of two popular tools: Notion and Notes. Additionally, we considered Pinterest for its use in finding inspiration and Bucket, an app specifically designed for tracking and sharing bucket list items. Our analysis focused on the features, usability, and effectiveness of these tools in supporting bucket list management.

Ensuring Relevant and Unbiased Data Collection

Creating relevant and unbiased questions was a collaborative effort. We brainstormed individually and then refined our questions together, ensuring that we remained aware of potential biases. Our project mentor played a crucial role in keeping us on track and ensuring the integrity of our questions. During meetings, we utilized discussion and whiteboard sessions to finalize our approach.

Key Patterns, Trends, and Insights

First, some quick demographics of survey respondents:

• 96.4% of respondents were between the ages of 18–24.
• 66.3% of respondents identified as female, 31.3% male, 2.4% nonbinary.

Through our surveys and interviews, we identified several key patterns:

Purpose and Prioritization: Many participants prioritized bucket list items based on personal significance and long-term aspirations. Items with emotional or personal importance were often prioritized higher.

Motivations and Obstacles: Intrinsic motivations, such as personal growth, adventure, and achievement, were common driving factors. Participants also cited obstacles like time, financial constraints, and fear as barriers to completing bucket list items.

Timelines and Methods: The timing of bucket list activities varied widely, with some participants setting specific deadlines and others adopting a more flexible approach. Various tools and methods, such as journals and digital apps, were used to track and manage bucket lists.

Ideation

User Persona

Based on our research, we created a user persona to understand and empathize with users, allowing us to pinpoint their specific needs. Meet Emily: a busy college student in her early 20s who seeks to make her life more meaningful and exciting by trying new things. However, she struggles with a lack of motivation and inspiration to complete her bucket list items. This user persona is the start of our synthesis and guided the team to ideate a product that solves Emily’s frustrations and prioritizes her goals.

We created an affinity map to organize the data from our surveys and interviews to find patterns in how our users felt. We found three key insights that stood out: encouragement and motivation, freedom of privacy, and new experiences.

1. Encouragement and Motivation: Many people create bucket lists but never think of completing them because they feel intimidated and demotivated. Without extrinsic motivators, most people do not feel the urgency to complete their bucket list items.
2. Freedom of Privacy: People who do frequently create bucket lists often times include activities that include their friend groups or significant others. Having the ability to share and privatize lists were important to future users.
3. New Experiences: With stressful and busy lives, people have a strong desire for new experiences to find different and exciting ways to change their everyday lives. This is often presented in traveling destinations, scheduled activities, and first-time events.

Final Problem Statement

Based on our user research and synthesis, we formed a final and specified problem statement to focus on our user’s pain points and guide our design decisions going forward.

Sketches

With our synthesized research and new How Might We statement, we brainstormed features and put them into sketches. We designed pages independently and found overlapping ideas such as:

• Explore Page: Users can find inspiration for new bucket list items based on their interests and personalized filters.
• Gamification: Adding a currency and shop to incentivize users to use the platform and complete goals.
• Customization: Drawing inspiration from Notion, we wanted to include elements like avatars that users can personalize.
• Collaboration: Allow users to collaborate and compete on shared bucket lists while also providing the ability to privatize personal lists.

Mid-fi Prototyping

We transitioned from sketches to digital frames by recreating them on Figma. We then refined them iteratively based on feedback and usability testing. To translate our problem solutions into product features, we conducted thorough analysis and prioritization, focusing on those solutions that directly addressed user needs and aligning them with our product’s goals and vision through collaborative brainstorming and strategic planning.

From our sketches, we created and developed many mid-fi frames and decided on 10 features.

• “Onboarding” where users take an adventure type quiz.
• “Explore page” where users get bucket list suggestions based on their onboarding results.
• “Profile” where users can view their own and others’ achievements. They can also share their bucket lists for friends to see.
• “Create a List Page” where users can customize the list page’s avatar, add a description, include collaborators, add bucket list items, and indicate the level of difficulty.
• “Home Page” is where users can view all their lists, private and shared.
• “Individual List View” where users can view their personal bucket list and see their progress.
• “Collaboration List View” where users can view their own and other users’ progress on their bucket lists, enjoy a visual racing element, and earn coin rewards.
• “Editing List” where users can edit titles/items and descriptions, change the list avatar, and manage collaborators.
• “Individual List Item View” where users can upload pictures, add detailed descriptions, tag bucket list items, and break down goals.
• “The Shop” where users can purchase new characters with coins and personalize them with various accessories and backgrounds.

Usability Testing

For usability testing, we had a total of 4 participants. Each was asked to completed the following tasks:

• Creating a new list.
• Make a new list item.
• Interacting with shop
  - Make a purchase
• Complete a goal/list item.
• Add a list to your profile.

Findings

Creating and Managing Lists

• Users found it unclear how to add a list from the gallery page, suggesting the need for more intuitive navigation and clearer instructions.
• There was a desire for prioritizing and reordering goals within lists.
• Completing goals was somewhat annoying due to the need to repeatedly click out of overlays, and users suggested varying the completion messages to enhance the experience.

Home and Explore Pages

• The home page was cluttered, and users found the lack of scrolling functionality frustrating. They suggested a more streamlined design, reducing clutter, and providing clearer categorization of shared and private lists.
• On the explore page, users wanted descriptions for gallery items and found the “Pick of the Day” redundant. A weekly or monthly pick was suggested instead.

Profile and Customization

• Users found the profile page easy to navigate but suggested adding an option to upload profile photos and better integration of character customization. The current placement and design of the profile editing icons were found to be inconsistent and confusing.

Prioritized Issues to Address

1. Clutter Reduction and Design Consistency

• Simplify and declutter the interface, particularly on the list and home pages.
• Ensure a consistent design system across all pages.

2. Improved Navigation and Functionality

• Make adding and managing lists more intuitive.
• Enhance the shop’s functionality with clear purchase feedback and better customization options.

3. Enhanced User Experience

• Introduce features for prioritizing and reordering goals.
• Provide varying completion messages to improve engagement.

4. Gamification and Community Features

• Add more interactive and community-driven elements, such as racing with friends and forums for goal discussions.
• Offer clear feedback when users earn coins and provide more customization options for avatars.

User insights guided our attention toward simplifying our features and providing stronger feedback to increase motivation among users.

Hi-fi Prototyping

Design Style Guide

Final Designs

Flow 1–3: Onboarding / Explore / Profile

1. Onboarding

• After creating an account, onboarding introduces our “adventure types” through a personality quiz that aims to help curate user’s explore page where users can pick out what categories they usually have in their bucket list. As users go through the adventure type quiz, they unlock a starting avatar based on the adventure type that they get. There are 4 adventure types: the traveler, explorer, trailblazer, and our navigator — each with their own respective avatar from the app.

2. Explore

• In the explore page, users can find new bucket list items for inspiration on adding to their bucket list voyage. The explore page is curated based on the user’s adventure type, but also the items that they have or will have on their own lists. This is seen through the recommended section and the infinite scroll at the bottom of the page. When users are feeling uninspired or in need of a new adventure, this is one of the catalysts to help our users feel more motivated.

3. Profile

• In the profile page, users can reflect on their accomplishments and their progress in completing bucket lists, through badges which can be attained through various interactions such as completing bucket list items, making new lists, etc. Users can also see other user’s profiles and their friends progress in their bucket list journey.

Flow 4–6: Create A List / Home / Editing List

4. Create A List

• Through our create-a-list page, users can create their own distinct avatar for that respective list. Users also have the option of adding more details to what their list is about, adding collaborators to work on a single list together with other friends, and the ability to add their items on this page.
• To help maintain a standardized coin distribution system, we have our users pick the “level of difficulty” for that bucket list item to decide how much coins they get back when completing it. The harder a bucket list item is to complete for the user, the more coins they will get.

5. Home

• In our home page, users can find all their lists: private and shared collaborative lists.
  — Following the user’s bucket list journey, we picture the bucket list as a swimming pool, visually showing the start and finish line marked at the end. The start line represents where the user’s avatar is at the beginning of their bucket list journey. As the user completes more and more items on their list, the closer they get to the finish line and the more coins they receive overall, symbolizing the user’s journey and the little accomplishments that help them get to the finish line.
  — In the collaborative list, users can work on the same list; seeing each other’s progress on the same screen where users can cheer each other on and spark a friendly competition to check off more bucket list items while still receiving coins to spend in the shop.
  — To make the gamification aspects less redundant for long-time users, we wanted to give our users the ability to unlock special accessories or avatars based on completion of certain list items. For example, doing a very “trailblazer” adventure-type activity will unlock the trailblazer avatar if not previously unlocked.

6. Editing List

• In the editing list page, users can add or remove bucket list items from their list, change the avatar for their list, and manage collaborators.

Flow 7–8: Individual List Item View / The Shop

7. Individual List Item View

• In the individual list item page, users can get a more in-depth view of each of their bucket list items. Here, users can add tags to their list items to help organize and preview “goal breakdowns”, mini-quests recommended by the app to help motivate the user in completing the bigger bucket list item.

8. The Shop

• The shop is the central hub for avatar customization, the place where users can spend their coins on new avatars and accessories. Making their avatars personal to them, users can mix-and-match different combinations from their closet and see other clothing articles or avatars to strive to buy in the shop.

Presentation Day

On presentation day, we had the opportunity to showcase our project to a panel of judges. During the presentation, we received valuable feedback from the Matthew Paquette.

One of the key points raised was the importance of scaling the product effectively to meet the needs of a growing user base. Another critical feedback was the suggestion to conduct thorough testing of the product idea with real users and their actual bucket lists to ensure its viability and relevance. Additionally, the judges advised us to narrow down the scope of our project to focus on key features and functionalities that would deliver the most value to our target audience. These insights provided us with valuable direction for further development and refinement of our project, guiding us towards a more successful and impactful outcome.

Challenges

During this sprint, we faced various challenges that required careful navigation and problem-solving. These included managing technical constraints while implementing new features, integrating user feedback seamlessly into the redesign process, and effectively managing time and resources. Additionally, aligning the redesigned gamification elements with the overall user experience posed its own set of challenges, necessitating a balance between engagement and usability. Furthermore, maintaining consistency in visual design across different pages and features demanded meticulous attention to detail and frequent iterations. However, despite these obstacles, our team remained committed to delivering an enhanced user experience and successfully overcame challenges through collaborative problem-solving and iterative design approaches.

Next Steps

Based on the feedback received during the presentation and our own reflections, the logical next steps for this prototype would be:

1. Scale the product effectively: Implement strategies to accommodate a growing user base while maintaining performance and user experience standards. This may involve optimizing infrastructure and enhancing scalability features.
2. Conduct user testing with real bucket lists: Engage with real users to gather feedback on the prototype and validate its relevance and usefulness in real-world scenarios. Conducting thorough user testing will provide valuable insights into user preferences, pain points, and expectations, enabling us to refine the prototype and tailor it more closely to user needs.
3. Narrow down the scope: Evaluate the current scope of the project and identify key features and functionalities that align most closely with the needs and preferences of our target audience. By focusing on essential elements, we can streamline development efforts, improve efficiency, and ensure a more focused and impactful user experience.

Our team on presentation day!