Application development

Some base requirements should be established before development of the application

The purpose of the application is to set the specific environment through the physical product. It must provide reasonable control via wireless connection.
The application is supposed to give an overview of all present modes, as well as give an option to create custom modes, to control the user's environment.
The application must differentiate the modes as per the type of conducted activity.

Ideation

The same metaphor of “create your own bubble” was planned to be implemented, and this time it was more practical because there were no engineering constraints.

Multiple options were tried that ranged from a very obvious display of the bubble metaphor where users are constantly interacting with bubbles in the interface to a simplistic version where bubbles are just elements of the background.
Most importantly, the application needed to differentiate between the modes by categorizing them into different activity types: focus, energize, relax. It appeared that the balance in the appearance needed to be maintained for the sake of consistency of placement of the control elements.
The application must not act as a separate distraction and, therefore, must be as consistent as possible for people to quickly adapt to it and not spend too much time figuring out how to turn on another mode.

The PSS in question is acting within the wellbeing of the user and therefore, as it has been discovered during discussions with experts from the companies that are designing space-in-space solutions, must offer a high level of customizability.

So, the app needs to be able to let users create their own modes, either using preset data (sounds and light patterns) or choose/make them on their own.

Modes research

It has been identified that, in fact, there is a relation between types of light, music, air quality and the type of activity conducted by a human.

For example:

Lighting effects and distribution can directly create a certain psychological impact on the user: it can create tension, relaxation, spaciousness and more inside of the human mind.
Sound frequency and genre of music can directly relate to either focusing or relaxing activity.
There exists an ideal humidity for human concentration.
Certain scents can enhance certain human activities. Fun fact: as some people might have heard, casinos use specific scents to stimulate a desire to gamble!

This consideration is crucial in designing the physical setting of the modes to stimulate users to concentrate.

Prototyping

There were, essentially, two stages of prototyping. Paper prototyping was used to assist in developing the idea of the bubble metaphor and modes.

Relatively quickly the work had been moved to the Figma workspace to continue prototyping there. Essentially, a MVP has been developed and it was time to start testing it.

Testing

Testing of the application is an ongoing process. The heuristic evaluation has been conducted to identify possible areas of improvement. It helped to discover that most of the improvements need to be implemented within the usability aspect of the application. Therefore, the user testing is currently focusing on the usability.

At the moment, the plan is to finish the usability testing and start focusing on other aspects of user interaction: accessibility, acceptability and learnability.