A few weeks ago, a friend of mine expressed how frustrated she was because she had to stop practicing one of her favorite hobbies. She just didn’t have time for it anymore. Her studies and her job were increasingly taking more time from her. Moreover, having a 2-hour commute every day was not helping her.

I discussed this topic with a few more friends, and I was surprised to find this was a common issue. People were frustrated because they had to abandon some of their hobbies and had issues keeping up with the rest of hobbies that they still tried to practice. The main factors in this issue were work (overtime), studies and long commutes.

As a UX Designer, this issue tickled my curiosity. This was something I related to and maybe I could offer an effective solution to the problem. That curiosity and willingness to solve it brought me to create Hobble, an app for busy people to find low time-consuming hobbies. With Hobble, users can find and experience hobbies tailored to their needs and available time, share their accomplishments and hobby experiences and connect with people.

When I started digging around the problem, I had a hypothesis in mind: If people don’t have time for their hobbies, they might need to find less time-consuming activities to do or hobbies that can be practiced in short periods of time. However, I needed to validate this statement. My next step was to sketch a Lean Survey Canvas and start working on a survey. I needed to know if this was really an issue, why and how I could start building up a solution.

The Lean Survey Canvas helped define the questions of the first survey.

However, the first survey turned out being inconclusive. Since I needed additional quantitative data to start drawing conclusions, I released a second survey that helped me obtain the necessary information. Overall, the surveys generated more than 80 results that defined the interviews, which were useful to obtain qualitative data.

The survey results show that:

Most people (69.5%) feel like they don’t have enough time for themselves quite often.

65.2% of the participants also feel they do not have enough time for their hobbies.

In a scale from 1 (less) to 5 (more), most participants indicated that their hobbies are as time-consuming as a 3 in the scale, with the next most voted value being 4.

65.2% of participants also feel that often or always pushing their hobbies aside and prioritizing other things.

Most people (65.2%) have abandoned a hobby because they didn’t have enough time at some point in their lives.

87% of the participants would be willing to learn about new hobbies, with 78.3% of the participants preferring less time-consuming hobbies (doable in a few minutes). The rest (21.7%) would rather learn about more time-consuming hobbies that require more commitment.

These results revealed that people feel like they don’t have time to entertain themselves with hobbies. These get usually pushed aside because there are other priorities.

After analysing the quantitative data, I started working on an Interview Guide and looking for people who could be an interesting fit for the research process. I approached 5 interviewees from different backgrounds and asked them to walk me through one regular day of theirs. My goal was to identify pain-points throughout their everyday lives regarding the balance between their responsibilities and leisure/free time. Moreover, I also asked them about their hobbies and favourite activities. The interviews validated my hypothesis and revealed that there is the need to use our time in more meaningful ways. People want to learn about less time-consuming hobbies and to acquire new knowledge while still being able to relax.

I’m constantly pushing hobbies aside in order to prioritize my responsibilities. You can actually do lots of things without money, so time is the main issue.

— N., one of the interviewees.

Affinity Diagram: Interpreting Data

Since I had a great amount of both, quantitative and qualitative data, I created an Affinity Diagram in order to narrow down the research findings and define pain-points and opportunities.

With the Affinity Diagram, I sorted out the information in order to get more specific and valuable data. By then, I was already having nightmares about post-its attacking me at night.

Pain-Points and Opportunities

These are the pain-points people are currently facing during their journeys:

People have a hard time balancing their hobbies.

People do not have time to fully commit to all their hobbies.

People end up abandoning hobbies because of factors like time and money.

Moreover, some bits of data also allowed me to define opportunities to help people:

People want to learn about new less time-consuming hobbies.

about new less time-consuming hobbies. People are interested in using their time to acquire new knowledge.

in using their time to acquire new knowledge. People want to manage their time more efficiently, including moments when they do not know what to do.

At this point, I had a few possibilities in mind: a product that tackled this issue could aim to improve people’s time management or maybe help them find new hobbies that required less commitment while still being satisfying. Based on the research findings, the second option seemed a better way to help people solve their problem: Hobble was born.

Problem Statement

At this stage, I had defined the problem I was trying to solve and how I would approach it. With that in mind, I also defined the problem statement.

Busy people need a way to find less time-consuming hobbies because they want to use their time to learn about and experience new things.

Persona

As a way to synthesize and converge all the research findings into one point, I also created a User Persona.

Meet Carla Medina, a student and school teacher from Blanes, a small northern city in Spain. Carla has a 2-hour commute from her hometown to Barcelona, where she studies her Master’s Degree and works as a teacher. She has been feeling frustrated because she isn’t using the commuting time as efficiently as she would like.

Ideally, she would work on her laptop, but the train sometimes is so full that she can’t even get a seat. She’s been thinking about learning something new during that time. Since she does not have a lot of time for her hobbies and, in fact, she has had to abandon some of them. Therefore, she would like to find new hobbies that can be done while commuting or in short periods of time.

Feature Prioritization and the MVP

The next step was to define the core of the product, with the necessary features for establishing a Minimum Viable Product. The definition of the MVP was based on what seemed most valuable to users like Carla (Research) as well as on suggestions from developers (ease to build).

As stated in the brief, the core pillars of Hobble are Find, Experience, Share and Connect. Therefore, the product needed a series features for these core parts to work and fulfil the persona’s needs. In order to define the MVP features and the future of the product, I used the following MoSCoW Diagram:

Ideating, Prototyping and Iterating

Once I defined the MVP and the User Flow, I was ready to start generating ideas and iterations. I started creating a low-fidelity paper prototype in order to quickly test a few ideas with users, which I then iterated into mid-fidelity wireframes.