03.2020 - 04.2020
Slate Scale
Companion App
The Slate app is a companion app to help users of the Slate Wheelchair Scale to monitor and track their weight overtime in an intuitive and effortless manner.
My contribution:
Interviewing & Surveying, Wire-framing, Prototyping, Visual Design, User testing
Teammates :
Jasmine Zeng, Kai Zhang
What is Slate?
Slate is the companion app to the Slate Wheelchair Scale. It acts as the interface which the user interacts with the scale.
Weighing is important but very difficult for most wheelchair users.
Keeping track of weight helps prevent conditions like diabetes and heart diseases. However, wheelchair users can’t always stand on a bathroom scale. Those who can stand have poor balance and can easily trip.
What is Slate?
Slate is a scale designed for wheelchair users. It aims to blend weighing into an everyday routine.
Passively track your weight without extra effort.
Challenge
How might we help users organize and visualize the data through the app?
Introducing
Home screen
Check your weight and your progress all in one page.
Recent weight display
See what's most important right away.
As Slate automatically tracks your weight, the app will display the most update measurement.
Weight progress graph
Get a peek at your recent progress.
Tracking your progress is an important part of helping you achieve your goal, so it is placed in the forefront.
Analysis screen
Giving you more ways to visualize progress.
Weekly Graph
Monthly Graph
Yearly Graph
Find out about how your weight has trended in the past week, month, or year.
Analysis screen
Set a goal for yourself to contextualize progress.
A touch of delight.
Emulating an analog body scale, the weight display adds a bit of playfulness weighing.
Learn the product.
The app starts with a quick guide to set up and use the Slate Wheelchair Scale.
Process
To keep the experience smooth and easy, we decided to keep only necessary functions that facilitate the use of the scale.
Visual Design Iterations
To determine the layout of the home screen, we explored focusing on the weight reading vs. focusing on the progress.
Concepts with Weight Progress on top
Concepts with Weight reading on top ✔
(credits to Jasmine Zeng)
(credits to Jasmine Zeng)
Focusing on the weight reading was the final direction as it is quicker and easier for the user to take in the information, and more test participants responded better to this formation.
Many visual styles were explored to achieve a friendly but unique look. Green was used as the brand color for its connection to health and friendliness.
The final design.
The final design was chosen for its readability, friendliness, and simplicity.
Next steps
Refining Information Visualization
How the information is displayed can greatly alter how it is perceived. There is much more to explore in how the user's weight trend can be visualized effectively.
Provide guidance
Currently Slate focuses on delivering accurate information to the user. An interesting direction can be providing informed guidance to help users achieve their goals.
What I learned
Don't go into visual design too early
In this project, I went into designing the visuals too early and fell in love with a design. I ended up having to change a lot of it as the structure of the app changed. This risked narrowing the design too early.
