The Daily Reflect
After more than one year in a global pandemic, mental wellness has taken a hit. Around us, people are becoming more aware, and more careful with their mental wellbeing. Mindfulness has become important, and activities such as yoga, meditation, breathing exercises and journaling, is something that people are trying to implement more into their day-to-day.
This project was a 1- week solo project where the mission was to create a Habit Tracking application, with mid-fidelity wireframes, meaning the screens are in grey-scale.
What is Gratitude Journaling: “Gratitude journaling is the habit of recording and reflecting on things (typically three) that you are grateful for on a regular basis. In essence, you are rewiring your brain to focus more on the positive aspects of your life and build up resilience against negative situations. Keeping a gratitude journal is a popular practice in positive psychology — the scientific study of happiness. It’s commonly also referred to as “counting your blessings” or “three good things.” — Happy feed
With a wide range of different meditation & yoga apps, I turned to some friends and asked what they are missing in terms of applications for mindfulness. One friend explained that she is currently using the “5 minute journal” and she loves it. She started writing in it when the pandemic happened. However, she often gets distracted on her way to finding a pen, or picking up the notebook… She also mentioned:
“Imagine if I had my journal digitally! Then I would have gotten a reminder on my 1 year anniversary of journaling, that would have been so cool!”
Survey
I sent out a survey to my network, LinkedIn, Slack and Instagram, asked friends to ask their friends to participate (trying to get a snowball effect going) and I managed to get 116 responses. The responses gave me great insights on the topic. I also asked how they prefer to journal and what they normally note down.
The majority prefers to take notes freely (52.4%), but it not a large majority. Many (47.6%) prefers having a guided journal to fill out:
What I also found out from the survey is that when people are journaling, the most common thing to take notes on is “What am I grateful for?”
Positive affirmations, what can make today great, things that I have done well, are also common things to write about.
User interviews
After the survey, I had more questions that I wanted answers to. I moved on to User Interviews. I wanted to speak to people that are familiar with Mindfulness, and preferably also familiar with journaling.
I made 8 interviews in total, men and women in the ages between 26 and 36. There are from Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and the UK. Five out of them (four women and one man) are currently journaling and see clear benefits of doing it, but they were all struggling with consistency:
- “For some time I did it daily... Now I do it whenever I remember”
- “I have tried many different ways of doing it (pen and paper, guided journals, 5 different apps), but nothing helped me make it into a daily activity”
- “The apps I have tried so far for Journaling have been too complex and have had too many different screens and features, it was not what I was looking for”
One of the interviewees informed me that she has tried 5 (!) different journaling apps, but neither of them had been any good or suited her needs (see third quote). They asked for too much information every day and there was no way to set any reminders. The hardest thing was to remember to do it every day.
The ideal application would let you write just the amount that you want, but still lets you take the time to think of 3 positive things every day & help you with structure and reminders.
Affinity Mapping
After defining the problem statement, I started organising the collected data and created an Affinity Diagram. I noticed many similarities and patterns. People that journal also have interest in meditation, yoga, and other mindfulness activities. Another pattern I noticed was related to mental wellness struggles, such as stress, anxiety, depression, meeting with psychologists regularly, etc. The benefits they saw from journaling were:
- Helps to relieve stress
- Makes me feel grateful
- Helps me focus on the positive things in life
- Keeps me grounded
- Helps me sort my thoughts
Problem Statement
After having my affinity mapping ready, I could start working on my problem statement.
Problem statement: “People that are interested in self-improvement are frustrated because they are struggling to get Mindfulness activities into a daily habit. If we can solve this problem, it would impact these people positively because it would reduce stress levels and calm anxiety.
It would also benefit our business because we could further expand and implement more Mindfulness activities which would reach a wider audience.”
Persona
Now that I had a clear overview of all the information I had collected via survey and interviews, and the problem statement, I could create my persona. The result is Cristina, a 29 years old, full time worker. She enjoys a healthy lifestyle and is interested in improvement. She struggles with self-esteem, anxiety and stress, and wants to improve her overall wellbeing. Her quote would be:
“I want to implement more mindfulness in my day-to-day but I haven’t found an optimal way of doing it”
First Sketches
When having my persona well defined, I started doing some first sketches. I started off by using the Crazy 8 method. At this point “The Daily Reflect” was born and the ideas of how to create the prototype started coming to me. After some rounds of sketching, I moved my prototype into Figma.
I had already learned from my survey, that most people like taking notes freely, but I did keep in mind that almost as many liked to follow a guided journal, so I decided very early on that I wanted to include both options.
Crits and Usability Testing
During the week, we did a Design Crits session with the team, and I got the opportunity to get some feedback on my first Figma prototype. The team came with very valuable feedback and suggestions for The Daily Reflect. After the Crits, I started with the Usability Testing. The tests really give me good insights on the functionality and simplicity of the app, so helpful. There were definitely some changes that had to be made. Time to iterate, iterate and iterate!
Prototype & Iterations
Having Cristina, my persona, and my problem statement in mind during the process + after having done several Usability Tests & iterations, I could work on my prototype. Some of the iterations during the process were:
Usability Testing and Crits showed me that users want the options to record audio instead of typing their text. So the option to record your voice, and having it translated into text automatically, was added.
Also, in case you prefer the traditional way of journaling (by hand, in a journal) you can instead chose to take a photo of your text and upload it in the app. In this way you can log it and keep it safe inside the app.
The Home screen also had a make-over, making the Journal more accessible (placed above the calendar) and showing indication to the “Journal Guide” for first time users.
The “final” result:
There are still a lot of room for improvement, especially the third screen, the “Journal Guide” which is way too busy. User testers gave great examples, such as having a “video tutorial” of the best practices of Gratitude Journaling could be an option to add. Or a more visual type of guide, at least. For people that doesn’t like to read that much, this screen is not optimal.
Another thing that can be improved is that some details have been overly explained, such as the 5th screens “Record voice” & “Upload a photo” options. I explained with:
1, The icon of voice and photo
2, The text “option: Upload photo/Audio”
3, An information box / pop up that explains this again
Probably, all these 3 indications aren’t necessary!
Also, as mentioned in the problem statement, this is an app that could be further advanced into a more complete Mindfulness type of app, offering more activities such as meditation, breathing exercises, maybe even yoga, to reach a wider audience. I decided to focus on the one thing I noticed maybe wasn’t very well covered at the moment. Here is a short video of the prototype:
Thank you for taking your time to read this report!
It has been a very interesting process that I really enjoyed working on. I’m looking forward to creating more ideas that have an impact on people’s wellbeing and overall happiness.
If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to reach out in the comments! ⭐️
