My reflections on our design project:
Daily Reflections
A community journaling app
Note: This page is still being updated, final version of this documentation will be live by February 1, 2023
With Alice Lee and Alison Chang
Initial Idea: Finding identity, community and a sense of belonging. My motivation to work in this direction came from the overwhelming feeling of having to understand myself anew when I moved to a new country. I felt unmoored and unstable, navigating a new terrain of connecting with the melting pot that is New York. While I did not understand the problem much, I felt like there was a possibility for an intervention within this topic.
Original documentation here:
https://saudamusharrat.com/process-website/design-research-p1/
Collaboration: Alice and I found a common ground to work on, which was to explore the topic of identity and self esteem among young adults. Both of us could relate to the idea of feeling unsure of our place, about what we are supposed to do. Most of the influences around us try to sweep us in a multitude of directions, but when we cannot keep up, it negatively affects our mental health.
Interview and research: During our literature review, we wanted to cover themes such as culture conflict, body image, social media and mental health to start framing our interview questions. Another domain we were exploring was the effect of art therapy or creative expression on these themes. We conducted 6 interviews, among them 4 were target users within the age range of 14-26 and 2 domain experts.
Our main findings from both the primary and secondary research are:
- Most of our target users feel like better organization of their daily lives and tasks can help them spend their time better.
- They feel like they are not being productive enough, especially when they see peers or people on social media doing so much.
- They feel a sense of achievement when they make something creative, such as writing a story or artwork, and receive positive feedback from others upon sharing their work.
- There is a general sense of dissatisfaction in young adults that stems from family, difference in culture, diverse environments etc. It negatively affects their self esteem. It helps boost their confidence when they can find friends who share the same struggles.
- Being able to reflect on past thoughts and actions can help motivate them. This was a possible solution since it helped one of our interviewees achieve a better sense of identity and confidence.
- Community plays a big part is instilling validation and acceptance when young adults feel unsure about their place in life
Original documentation here:
https://saudamusharrat.com/process-website/design-research-p2/
Explosion of Ideas: Based on these observations we decided to explore the following solutions:
Original documentation here:
https://saudamusharrat.com/process-website/design-research-p3/
Figjam board link:
https://www.figma.com/file/dKmEpRGKChCrlXFEbPGfXq/IDM—UX-Research-Project?node-id=0%3A1
Iteration 1: Project Management and Content Creation
Our first prototype was of a platform that would allow our users to create fast content to share on social media and start bigger projects in new areas they want to explore. Given the fast-paced and busy lifestyle of our target users (18-20’s), we wanted to give them the opportunity to create or join projects in various fields as a beginner that would help them gain new skills and find new friends along the way. This was a mess of many ideas that tried to cater to too many users. So we broke down all the concepts and took the best features to the next iteration. We also received the feedback that this product would make users feel like they constantly need to be productive which was the opposite effect of what we intended. So we took a few steps back to focus on the emotional aspect of why we started to work on this topic.
The fast content with AI tool had prompts to guide users to give inputs that would in the end generate aesthetic and sharable media. This received many positive feedbacks. We also realized we had to incorporate the community feature since our research indicated our users need friends and sense of belonging to shape their sense of identity.
Link to design:
Iteration 2: Community Journal App
Our second iteration took the form of a mobile app this time to better fit the lifestyle of our users. The concept of a community journal appealed to all of us in the team. We wanted to make this a positive environment that encouraged reflecting on the user’s journey, their struggles, small wins, and moments to be remembered and cherished. We focused on three features as the highlight of our product:
- Prompt guided daily journal entries that inspires reflecting on the user’s day-to-day moments. These entries could be narratives, photos, short reels or even music.
- Creating a journal page from the prompt answers which is aesthetic and customizable in terms of design. This journal entry could also double as content that can be shared on social media or the app’s own community.
- Feed page which is a collection of all the shared journal pages from users in the community.
From the user tests, we found mostly positive feedback on whether our target users would find something interesting in our app to explore. Some preferred the journal more but also liked the addition of the community as something exciting, and vice versa. Based on the feedbacks we moved on to finalize the designs by modifying the following aspects:
- More dynamic options to customize journal page
- Making prompts optional
- Stronger privacy features for users who do not want to share, or make public certain journal entries
- Positive messages using mental health therapy language to avert negative thoughts. Also provides tips across the app pages on healthy interactions that would help strengthen mental wellbeing.
- Discarding the toxic traits of social media such as likes and follower count. We have only added notes instead of comments to allow interactions
Link to design:
Final Prototype
All that was left now was to work more on the design of the higher fidelity prototype. We chose to incorporate styles from therapy apps with calming tones and images.
Link to design:
Final Presentation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19D71l5fBM0MAyga9Lm44udXGOSnluwOThb-9j5fJCBo/edit?usp=sharing
Prompt guides for daily journal entries
Customize journal entry page into aesthetic content and share if the user wants to. They can select to make it private or public. If they make it public, it will show up on the feed for the community in the app to see. Users can also choose to keep the notes option on if they want to initiate interactions on this prompt. Hashtags help to categorize the entries.
The feed page can be viewed as grid album or list preview. Users can also search based on prompts that others answered, hashtags for certain topics or just view the content only from their close friends. The notes feature will filter out negative language.
The profile page is a collection of all the entries categorized under the day and month to give the feel of a real journal. The lock icons represent those entries which are private.
Going forward, there are also features that we plan on incorporating such as incentives to come back to the app daily, milestones and trophies on interaction, user statistics to show them certain behavioral trends based on entries and the option to create, answer and share your own prompts.
My Final Thoughts
Working on this project gave me some valuable insight into the original thoughts and struggles that led me to find a solution to a feeling I could not even define at first. Over the course of conducting the interviews, we started to get the bigger picture when our domain expert helped us put the puzzle pieces together. She described how we suffer from forced independence as we reach adulthood and the way we are expected to navigate life without any sort of instruction manual. We get used to the idea that everyday struggles are normal but rarely are we taught to ask for guidance about the new challenges that come with being a young adult. In this period of trying to figure out how to take care of ourselves, it feels like everyone is doing much better than we are.
Now if I take this learning and remember my initial thoughts as I moved to a new country, got faced with a new set of challenges, meeting so many new and diverse people, I started to understand what the problem I was solving for. I wanted to see everyone else in my situation talk about how they went day to day, not just the summary or the one line lessons they learned. I wanted to share my feelings and have someone find that relatable enough to reach out to me so that we could have a conversation about how tough this experience truly is.
Traditional social media apps don’t do that often. It does not promote a space to be vulnerable, rather it is designed to garner engagement, opinions, and instant gratification in any form. It was important for us to put a hard distinction between the toxic features of social media and what we are trying to do with the community features in our app. That is why the positive language and the messages on the app, such as “Take a moment if you feel overwhelmed by everything you see“, “Every struggle you overcome is a win“, is integrated into the pages to make users more aware of reality rather than the perception of how others are doing. We wanted this app to feel like a friend who is supportive, telling us to pace ourselves, and relatable enough to not make us feel alone.
That is why I am very excited to continue working and building on this app because it truly feels like something me, my team, and every one who helped us test and refine it could personally benefit from.