LifeLab+ / LifeLab+ Parents
A mobile app designed at Glasgow Caledonian University as part of a research project with the aim of changing adolescent behaviours. We collaborated with psychologists from University of Southampton to create a variety of games and app activities in one big app for 12-16 year olds!
2020
Unity
Mobile
Project & Role
LifeLab+ is a mobile app made for a research project at Glasgow Caledonian University, in collaboration with psychologists from the University of Southampton. This project aimed to encourage changes in adolescent behaviour through an app with various games and activities designed to promote physical activity, nutrition and wellbeing in a fun, social manner. As such, we produced an app with various games and activities, each specifically focused on tackling different behaviours, such as light physical activity through an interactive adventure that uses GPS / map technology - similar to Pokémon GO. Another aim was to improve and support adolescent's with nutrition, which we explored extensively to find ways to make logging, tracking and learning about food to be more fun and engaging for our adolescent audience. By the time my contract ended on the project, we had produced several of these activities. The app was expected to go live and be used in the research trial in 2020, but unfortunately COVID-19 halted this and the project remains in an unfortunate position until alternative arrangements can be made. Despite that, we still published the app to the Google Play Store and App Store.
Being one of the few designers on the project due to our small team size, I had to wear many hats and quickly jump between different disciplines and tasks throughout the project. As such, some of my responsibilities included:
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Iteratively producing many wireframes and interactive mockups in Adobe XD based on feedback for internal and external presentation
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Designed and implemented the UI for various games and activities within the app
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Ideated, brainstormed and documented various game ideas and features with internal and external team
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Plotted out user journeys and actions for activities before implementing them with our in-house mission system
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Wrote and implemented character dialogue using Yarn (very similar to Twine)
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Wrote various instructions for the app, activities and guides for our users and external team
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Designed and produced a small shoot-y minigame using Unity's visual scripting system, Bolt
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Provided additional programming assistance where required
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Assisted in running playtesting and user research sessions with our target demographic (...included 1,000 school pupils in a few weeks too!)
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Regularly playtested and debugged the app, fixing or providing instructions on how to reproduce issues where possible
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Handled implementation of various art and game assets throughout the app
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...and probably some other things I've forgotten!
Due to the sprawling nature of the project, I have split my work across the main games / activities I was involved in and have primarily focussed on showing my prototype and mockup work that was used for exploring and demonstrating concepts.
You can find several video clips of my Adobe XD work in short video clips presented below.
(Credit to Kris Tsenova for the character and environment artwork - you can check out her portfolio here!)
Hub
One of the main features the app was to have was a central hub for launching activities and providing the player with an overview of the progress.
I was tasked at designing this hub, despite not knowing fully what features we would require at the time for the app - nor which would make the cut in the end. As such, I focused on designing a hub which would display the user's progress, profile, activities and an area for social features which were still to be defined. Unfortunately due to time and scope constraints, we eventually produced a more simplified version of the hub but maintained the appearance and general flow of the mockups.
Alongside designing the hub, I assisted in recreating it in Unity by creating various modular UI elements and scripts to assist the programming team ahead of time.
My main mockup in Adobe XD which can be seen in the video below:
Bobbie Saves The World
Bobbie Saves The World was one of the first activities I was involved in for the LifeLab+ app. The main purpose of this activity was to encourage teenagers to go outdoors by building a fun narrative game around the use of popular map / GPS-based technology. The game would require players to go to real locations in their nearby area which would be marked on their map to play minigames which would later progress the story.
Prior to making the game in Unity, I was tasked to produce a two-page document to pitch and summarise this new activity to everyone:
Alongside planning out the overall mission flow for the first main mission (similar to the images above) I was involved in developing the small minigames that the player would play. To fit the various tasks the player was given such as collecting gas and defeating enemies, I produced a small but flexible game loop and system using Unity's visual scripting system, Bolt. The game was relatively simple by design, requiring the players to complete their task by tapping or holding on different objects on the screen before the time runs out.
A short snippet of gameplay (taken from the trailer) can be seen below:
Food Challenges / Food Logger
A significant portion of development time was spent exploring ways in which we could make food and nutrition more engaging for adolescents. Working with our partners in Southampton, we initially explored creative ways to make logging food more engaging.
Towards the very start of me time on the project, I was tasked at designing and producing some interactive mockups which explored different ways of logging food in a fun but straightforward manner.
My initial concepts (from my first time using Adobe XD!) can be viewed below:
After demonstrating the number of concepts to the public at a small community science event, we decided to iterate further on the "stacking" concept which appeared to be the most popular. I developed this mockup (seen below) further before we eventually developed it in Unity and tested it with our target audience.
After testing with the target audience, we received important feedback that although the prototype was usable, the audience was not particularly keen on using it. As such, we went back to the drawing board and focused our efforts on targeting only one meal of the day: breakfast. Building upon research, we approached this design with "SMART" goals in mind and created a system for selecting and recording breakfast challenges.
We prototyped this concept in Unity but ran into significant usability issues and it wasn't quite meeting the goals we wanted.
Going back to the drawing board yet again, we redesigned the entire structure and context of the food component of the app, by narratively theming it around a hungry alien character who has crashed on Earth. This character was introduced to accompany a new match-3-type game which aimed to provide a fun incentive for participating in food challenges.
Although I was not involved directly in the game, I was brought on to design and apply the structure and presentation of the food challenges. I designed the selection, setup and logging screens - roughly adhering to SMART goals again - and mocked this up in Adobe XD:
Home Workouts
A home workout activity / system was produced by other members of the team while I was working on other components of the app. I was brought onboard midway through its development to design and illustrate a system for categorising and presenting the various proposed workouts, levels and more.
Below is the main mockup which was recreated closely in Unity. Like several of the other UI concepts, I helped make and set up the many UI elements that made up these screens.
LifeLab+ Parents
An additional requirement of the research project was to design and produce an accompanying parent app for LifeLab+.
Both the teams in Glasgow and Southampton worked together to brainstorm possible ideas for the parent app, ranging from allowing parents to participate in LifeLab+ app activities, to setting challenges for their children in the LifeLab+ app - alongside several other ideas. Some of these were ideas were produced through interviews and activities conducted with both parents and the children, to discover what both groups would be comfortable doing and sharing together for this hypothetical app.
Although the research we gathered led to some exciting concepts, unfortunately due to time constraints, we agreed that that parent app would take the form of a digital guide which would inform parents about the LifeLab+, alongside information and resources for supporting their child.
I was tasked and took ownership of designing and producing this app, which I initially designed and made an interactive mockup in Adobe XD, before creating it in around a week using Unity. The app was designed in a way that it could be expanded and modified very quickly at a later date if new activities, content or information needed to be added. Likewise, since all the text in the app had to be tailored by the Southampton team, I created a document with all of the text strings (and their context) in order to make the editing process easier.
