Through interviews, we learnt that Singaporean youths desire to focus on mental wellness, with a few blockers:
Emotion identifying flows are often too reductive
Many journaling apps encourage quick entries, which can turn into unhelpful venting rather than meaningful reflection.
Journaling feels repetitive and youths feel unengaged
Repetitive journaling becomes tedious, lackluster interfaces and interactions kill the habit quickly.
The RULER framework is an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning that focuses on key steps to regulate emotions in order to promote emotional intelligence and well-being.
Initial concept: Kura brings you through categorised emotions, definitions through the emotion labeling process
Leveraging on this simple framework and an existing list of emotion labels/words.
Previously designed journaling flow
This flow allows users to Identify and label how you're feeling
Our mascot, Kura, leads users to identify and journal their emotions
It got the job partly done, but with a few overarching challenges with the experience:
High Friction
The flow to identifying emotions still felt too reductive.
Is there a way to design a simple, integrated feature to account for this touchpoint?
Lack of fun
The concept of fruits as emotions was fun, but lackluster after a while
Is there a way to weave in a larger narrative in the journaling experience?
Info Hierarchy is not clear
The definition of emotions is not easy to view.
What changes in the info hierarchy might enable users to see this clearly?
Challenge
The flow to identifying emotions still felt too reductive.
Solution
Make a snack concept - additional step(s) to indicate intensity of emotions
What if you could create a snack by checking in your emotions? I wanted to leverage on the virtual pet in app – kura. My initial explorations was around exploring interactions and ways of representing, measuring the intensity of emotions.
The safe design:
Scale for selecting intensity
The experimental design:
Swipe to quantify intensity
Concept, Usability testing with 5 beta users:
Microinteraction
Swiping is fun but...
The quantifying of intensity was confusing to users, as the number felt too arbitary.
Intensity of emotion
Default to 'neutral'
Users often resorted to ‘picking’ the middle, neutral option when identifying emotion intensity.
Definition of emotion
Still not easy to see...
Users still did not notice the definition of emotions as they select the emotion
Users previously noted there was a lot of tapping which felt tiring. I saw a design opportunity to incorporate a wider range of interactions, and explored tap and hold gestures as well as swiping.
Tap -> Tap -> Swipe up
Tap -> Hold -> Select
As I added more visual elements onto the screen, I re-assesed the hierarchy of information and visuals. The plate of fruits took up a lot of real estate and attention, so I iterated on grouping relevant information (emotions, metadata) and the narrative elements (fruit plates).
Findings from the think out louds and usability testing
Swiping is redundant.
Testing revealed that the swiping interaction was a bit too much cognitive effort to do.
Definition of emotion is clearer now!
Information hierarchy was clearer, users now see the definition much more clearly.
Tap + Hold works but...
The interaction did not feel intuitive, made sense to users after they discovered it.
