Myle
Wearable Thought Catcher
Voice powered wearable to automatically convert your thoughts into actions via mobile applications.
Summary
UX and Industrial Design focus on reducing the constant chatter we have in our heads.
Project scope
Mobile app, Desktop app, Marketplace integration and Product Development.
My role
Design strategy, UX Design and Industrial Design.
Results
The IndieGoGo campaign was fully backed, reaching $152,875 CAD by 1,044 backers.
In July 2015. It also got a 500K for 30% deal at CBC show Dragon’s Den.
Strategy
User-centred design focused on the rapid iteration of prototypes with users and stakeholders.
Methodology
Product development using value proposition canvas.
Tools
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Solidworks
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Illustrator
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Photoshop
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AdobeXD
Introduction
Zen-like mindfulness in a small package
At the end of 2014, the founders of the company had been working for months on an early prototype that not only recognized commands much better than any existing solution in the market, but it aimed to be a unique device-agnostic wearable.
The device was activated by tapping it two, which created a conditional reaction to recording thoughts leaving the user with a zen-like feeling. All thoughts and actions were registered and processed on a mobile app.
How it works
Voice recording
The user taps the device to indicate the beginning of a thought. And taps again to mark its end.
Thought analysis
The MYLE sends the information via Bluetooth to the mobile device app, where the thought is recorded, categorized and potential actions are analyzed.
Action execution
The MYLE is integrated with several applications and triggers specific actions, like marking a date in a calendar, twitting an idea or counting calories consumed over the day.
Discovery
Most of our thoughts are forgotten
Myle was the perfect example of a solution without a clear definitive problem. This wearable device was aiming to reduce the constant chatter we have in our heads, branding itself as a thought catcher.
Every day your mind generates 70,000 thoughts, makes 2,000 decisions and 200 of them are averagely finished while the rest are forgotten and lost.
70,000
thoughts/day
20,000
decisions/day
200
remembered
Phones are wonderfully addictive devices
Multiple apps work hard at capturing the attention of the user and keeping them scrolling for hours. At the same time, classic phone apps do not make information capturing easy, the keyboard is too small for many users and automation solutions are not easy to set up.
Use cases
Myle needed to have a large enough user base to be profitable and bring the attention of 3rd party developers to provide integrations via APIs. During the early stages of development, we focused on the following scenarios.
Definition
From collection to visualization
The solution could be easily defined as collection, processing, action and visualization. The process to make this step happen where very complex and implied the integration of several different moving parts that needed to share information flawlessly without any interruption.
Data collection
This is going to be done by the wearable device synched with a mobile phone via Bluetooth.
Data processing
The application stores the recordings, voice-to-text processes are done in the background and the thought is displayed in the app.
Text to action
The text is recognized as potential actions, and they are submitted to 3rd party integrations.
Data visualization
The user is offered a summary of their thought and visualizes its trends and statistics.
UX and Industrial Design
Designing an ecosystem for your thoughts
The wearable device needed an ecosystem to be able to operate correctly, I was in charge of designing the mobile app,
Myle Cloud (user account web app) and doing small changes to the form physical device so it would be easier to prototype and mass production.
Mobile App
In order for Myle to work, it needed to be connected to a mobile device for the heavy lifting of processing the information and converting its content to actions based on the content of the thought.
This is a small sample of the screen specifications designed for the app.
Communicating the styles with the dev teams is crucial to guarantee the final results are exactly what was envisioned.
Mobile App
This is some documentation given to stakeholders and developers to explain the designed interaction.
Myle Cloud Web app
The system needed a management area that would allow individuals and organizations to centralize and coordinate which 3rd party applications needed to be in the system (Mylets), visualize historical data and manage groups or organizations the device will be syncing with.
Mylets are 3rd party integrations communicating with the device and sharing information with other systems
The user will have a variety of Mylets to choose from. For organizations the options were already predefined, so the user had preinstalled integrations and optional ones.