An app to help people who work from home get outside for a break
The brief for this university project was to design a response to a chosen social problem and create a thoughtful, powerful and provocative design response for a specific audience.
OutQuest addresses a common concern from people who have recently made the shift to regularly working from home: “I often don’t get outside all day.” Research shows that regularly getting outside has a positive effect on many aspects of mental and physical wellbeing.
OutQuest uses social connection wrapped around a light digital experience to encourage people to take a break outside. The website and app are relatively light on functionality to avoid additional distraction and to allow for greater flexibility for teams to adopt OutQuest into their existing team culture. The app includes a daily alarm, which interrupts the user's current routine, and encourages them to get outside by issuing daily quests.
To motivate people, OutQuest uses a bright and playful brand identity, friendly and relatable illustrated characters, and employs the visual rhetoric of quests. Quests are purposeful, familiar in popular culture, and provide opportunities for humour when blended with working from home tropes. Users create an avatar based on 1) a Quest character archetype (eg, bards, paladins, scholars and mages); and 2) a working from home outfit (eg, suit jacket and boxer shorts; onesies, trackpants and dressing gowns).
The website primarily provides a space for teams to share and compare their quest submissions, individual habit tracking, and information and guidance for team leaders.
The team page provides the focal point for regular team catch-ups to look at everyone’s quest submissions. Participants are motivated by the expectation from team members that they will contribute by uploading media to the website, and social reinforcement to complete quests through team members handing out awards.
"This is going to be a real thing, right?"
- Response from user testing.