Engaging Technology
My fascination with the use of 'entertaining' mechanics in 'serious' software started before I commenced my Melbourne University project and continues to this day. Here are just some examples.
Ready Steady Goal
Ready Steady Goal · Cellular Wars · Not Spent
For my undergraduate diploma, I designed a prototype of an app that helps to develop habits for achieving personal goals. The app encourages setting up simple, repeating, and measurable steps towards the goal. It keeps track of the progress and provides a visualisation to assist with identifying patterns.
Impact: After defending the thesis, I graduated with honours. This prototype also helped me to get accepted into the University of Melbourne.
Cellular Wars
Ready Steady Goal · Cellular Wars · Not Spent
One of my clients asked for assistance with developing a pitch for an app that would encourage people to measure mobile internet speed in different locations. I suggested using game mechanics for the purpose. The idea was to divide Australia into small areas (cells). The person who gets the fastest speed in that area becomes the leader of the area. That would encourage others to measure speed both more often and in more locations, in hope to get bigger numbers and usurp the current leader.
In a single design sprint, I developed the concept and visuals, and handed off to the client to present.
Impact: the pitch helped my client to secure the funding.
Not Spent
Ready Steady Goal · Cellular Wars · Not Spent
The digitalisation of money removed a lot of friction from spending. Impulsive purchases provide instant gratification at the expense of long-term goals. Not Spent is a concept app that helps people to save money by introducing instant gratification for not spending.
Spenders set up a saving goal and choose a beautiful motivational image either from presets or their photo library. Every time they resist spending, they enter that amount in the app, and the money go to their saving account instead.
Gratifications comes from instantly seeing progress towards the goal.
Impact: I published the concept on Medium and promoted on Twitter. The amount of views exceeded the amount of followers I had at the time, with the solid read ratio of 50%.