Noa

An average person receives over 100 notifications a day and it’s so easy to get off track when you have access to an endless span of distractions in the palm of your hand. noa is an AI-integrated case and e-ink screen that automatically organizes notifications by what the user finds important.

Project Overview

Project Duration

Ten weeks

Team Members

Gaige Dickerson, Darren Wells, Lydia Goshen, Ivy Watson

My Role

UX Design, Product Design, Visual Design

The Problem

The smartphone is easily one of the greatest inventions of our generation. The notifications that come with them can be helpful, but when we receive too many of these notifications, people’s productivity and focus can be hindered by the notification overload.

The Solution

We created noa, which is an AI integrated phone case with a detachable screen that learns from the user over time in order to learn how the user interacts with notifications, reduce the mental strain notifications cause to users, and increase the productivity of users.

Process

From the beginning, our group knew we wanted to improve people's productivity and organize people's daily lives. We first started with a competitive analysis to see if there was anything in the market that is solving the problem that we had in any way.

Then we went on to surveys to narrow down on our target audience and get user insight on experiences with their daily lives and notifications. We got 86 responces and we were able to draw some insights and narrow down on our target audience.

After narrowing down our target audience, we were able to reach out to different users that fits our range, and have a chance to interview them about their notifications. We also conducted shadowing, and usage reports for our research. With the researches that we did, we had enough data to do affinity mapping and draw out some key insights for our solution.

Key Research Insights

Important - People ranked Communication notifications as their most important.

Detach - Physically detaching users from their phones prevents them from getting sucked in.

Mental Model - Users share a mental model of how and when to interact with notifications.

Prioritized - Display notifications based on what the user finds important.

Lazy - People want to change their settings, but are often too lazy to.

Missing out - People fear missing out on notifications when not interacting with their phone.

With all the insights and data we have gathered, we created two personas and their user journey maps. So that we can gain a perspective similar to the user's, and find out different needs and expectations that users have.

Ideation

We were able to come up with the How Might We with the personas and the user journey maps that we had. After ideating, we came up with a simple interaction map of our solution as well.

How Might We

Interaction Map

Prototype

With all the work that we have done, we were able to create some blueprints of how noa would work, and explain how would the AI filter and prioritize the notifications that were coming in to the users phone.

Wireframes & Renderings