Spark is an application that aims to foster well-being by encouraging people to take part in daily challenges with a virtual community. We designed it as part of our Capstone Project of the Master in Human-Computer Interaction program.

I researched about technology for well-being and built the prototype for the iOS version, currently available for a group of private beta testers. You can watch a quick demo below.

The process

You can find a detailed account of our eight-month-long journey at the project’s official website. Here’s a lightning summary:

• Our client provided us with an initial direction that we developed into a hunt statement.
• We performed research to crystallize the direction into a concept.
  • Reading relevant literature
  • Interviewing experts
  • Comparing existing apps
  • Conducting an exploratory survey
• We focused on an idea: to challenge people to break out of their routine.
• We developed an email-based prototype that implemented the idea above, and had real people use it for a number of days. This is called a concept probe.
• We refined the concept through speed dating and low-fidelity prototypes.
• We crafted an interactive, high-fidelity prototype as a native iOS app that illustrated the final concept.

The team

We were four people sharing the responsibilities of researching, brainstorming, usability testing, and process-tweaking.

I was also responsible for engineering the interactive prototype using Swift and the iOS SDK.

From left to right, me and my friends André, Arundhati and Rui.

The client

Wow!Systems is an interactive software house based in Funchal, capital of the beautiful island of Madeira. They are software artists that envision and develop both multimedia solutions and useful, delightful software.