Note: this project is a work in progress.
This idea started on a whiteboard in my basement apartment in the summer of 2019. I had just been laid off and was craving structure in my suddenly very unstructured life. I needed to balance professional demands (applying for jobs, attending networking events) with my mental and physical wellbeing (daily walks, meditating). My experience had taught me that choosing a specific task to commit to every day simply disheartened me when I inevitably “messed up”. Instead, I drafted a “choose your own adventure” style approach with the hopes that it would be more sustainable long term.
Fast forward several months, and my scribbled whiteboard chart suddenly felt even more applicable. The pandemic had upended everyone’s routines. People were forced to figure out how to manage home and work lives and at least for me, those boundaries started to feel pretty blurry. I got out my dry erase markers and revised my “adventure”.
The (currently unnamed) wellbeing app will help people focus on different areas of their health (mental, physical, etc) with a flexible approach that emphasizes progress over perfection. This is a passion project that I’m working on by myself for now. Currently I am in the process of conducting research and designing and prototyping user flows. Eventually I hope to recruit an engineer to help bring this idea to life.
To start, I defined my problem statement from the user’s perspective so I could see if my way of thinking even made sense to others. My theory was that aging millennials (like myself) are starting to take an increasing interest in personal development, but don’t want to be tied to an overly regimented framework.
When I started to hear that other people also wanted more flexibility in their personal development/habit building, I looked for apps already doing this to avoid reinventing the wheel. But in searching through top rated apps on the Google Play store and “best of” blogs, most of what I found fell into the “overly regimented” category that I wanted to avoid.
To make order of the ideas floating around in my mind, I used FigJam to map out the areas of focus and questions that came up in my informal user interviews. After grappling with the balance of flexibility vs structure, I landed on my set of parameters for goal setting and outlined the steps needed for a user to define their goals.
First, they must define their areas of focus (these could be anything the user defines – mental health, physical health, professional development). Then they need to specify activities for each of their areas of focus. After that they set goals by choosing either a specific activity or more generally, an area of focus to do something in. I created a sample set of activities and goals to ensure the workflow would be flexible enough to allow these different kinds of goals (ex: do a specific activity vs do something in this area of focus).
Once I understood the framework I wanted to create to accommodate the right level of flexibility, I sketched out basic workflows to establish the necessary steps to create and view goals.
The two workflows I decided to focus on are 1) setting up goals and 2) viewing and recording goals. In a future iteration I plan to explore tracking progress over time.
Once I had the workflows sketched out, I moved on to wireframes to think through the most appropriate UI patterns.
Once the wireframes captured the two workflows I wanted to focus on first, I created mockups so that I could start thinking about aesthetic/stylistic decisions. It’s important that the app feel intuitive and simple even while handling somewhat complex logic. I leveraged Material Design components to create patterns that will be familiar to users. I also built the color palette using Material Design’s Theme Builder.
With the mockups fleshed out, I built a prototype using Figma to work through the interactions and make the workflow as intuitive as possible. You can explore the prototype or view the Figma file for more detail.
Moving forward, I hope to conduct some more focused user interviews to help prioritize things like reminders/notifications and progress reporting. I think one of the biggest puzzles to solve is how to keep users engaged and motivated to keep making progress. My plan is to use “mascots” for motivation, but more on that to come.
