Joey is an iOS application that helps university students in their 20s control negative thoughts by suggesting activities to do, such as thoughts record and mindfulness activities.
Project Type: Team (6 person)
Role: UI/UX Designer
Duration: Aug 2020 - Dec 2020
For my final project in Apple Developer Academy, my team and I developed an application named Joey.
Story Behind Joey
Started from me and my team interest in mental health issue, we then tried to go deeper with our research regarding this issue. It actually all started from me and my team similarity which we all have that, at least, one friend who suffer from mental health issue. Moreover, during this pandemic, mental health issue seems to be more crucial for young adults, especially university students who faced the brunt of many uncertainties following the initial virus outbreaks as colleges rushed to close campuses and transition to online learning. Many plans were postponed and cancelled. Students movements were limited as they are forced to stay at home.
After my team and I went deeper, we then found out that mental health issue that is very common for university students is stress.
My team and I also found out that:
User Persona
After conducting the desk research and interviews, my team and I summarized our target user' problems, behaviours, and needs in the form of User Persona.
My team and I chose female as our user persona because based on global study including in Indonesia, we found out that female students have experienced a higher level of stress compared to male students because they tend to be extra emotional and sensitive toward what is happening in their surroundings.
My team and I also did a deeper research by interviewing the experts which were psychologists and they suggest that when people having negative thoughts what they can do are;
- Practice mindfulness
- Thinking fun things to temporarly distract negativity
- Cut the rumination by releasing their emotion to others, and don't conceal it
Solution
Therefore, my team and I came up with a solution named Joey.
Joey is an application that helps user to reduce their negative thoughts by suggesting them activity to do to control your negative thoughts using thoughts record and mindfulness activity. Joey will also help user to journal their feelings but what makes it special is that Joey can help user to identify their emotion by detecting their face expression using Augmented Reality so that they know what they need to do to overcome the thoughts that they don't want.
The goal of Joey has never been to get rid of the negative thoughts but rather helping people like Betty (our user persona) to have a better control towards themselves when they are having negative thoughts.
Main Features
Detect Emotion
The best way to start is to identify your current emotion by clicking the “check your feeling” button. This feature addresses the user's pain that doesn’t know what are they currently feeling. It harnesses the power of ARKit framework and true depth camera, which available in iPhone X or later.
User still has to validate whether that's what they really feel or not. Joey will ask you why you feel that way and suggest you an activity to do based on your current emotion.
Actually, this feature was one of my suggestion. The reason why I suggested face detection is first I found out that according to U.S National Institute of Mental Health, passive data collection is one of the trends in mental health apps nowadays. Also, this feature can be one of value propositions that can distinguish Joey with the other apps.
I was also the one who mainly responsible in designing the UI and UX of this feature.
2. Thoughts Record
Thoughts record is a CBT framework that has been proven and used by the experts. This feature address users pain which they want to be listened without judging and available 24/7 for them. Also, it supports psychologist suggestion to release their emotion and not concealing it by journaling their thoughts.
Using CBT Thought Records user can practice capturing and identifying our negative automatic thoughts.
I was mainly responsible in designing the UI and UX of this feature as well as writing the contents.
3. Activities and MySpace
These are the activities inside Joey that has been chosen based on the scientific reason by the experts that work for each purpose.
MySpace is a place where user can keep track of your progress which allows them to reflect on their past. This feature can only be accessed once user logged in with their Apple account.
Here, user can see how many times they experience different kinds of emotions and the reason behind them. User can also read your previous thoughts record in the history section at the bottom.
UI Style Guide
UI Style guide is very important while doing this project. However, the guide is simple as we really only use green or yellow or play with the opacity.
Since I am new in Design, UI Style Guide is also new for me but it helped me a lot in working on this project not only the colors but also other things like naming rules and other elements sizes
We chose green as our main theme because we wanted our Joey to be calming for our users, then we found out that there are some colors that can make people calm; blue sky, purple, and green. We thought that blue or pink will be too biased so we eventually chose green. Green that is calming is not the basic green but more like green with a little touch of blue, there we came up with #5AC2BD.
All of the design for user interface mainly use Sketch and I personally tried to use Adobe Draw for illustration once.
Mascot; Why Bear?
The reason why we chose Bear as Joey is because we found out that Elena Harris from SpiritAnimal, each animal has its own power and offers opportunities to work on different lessons. And Bear's spirit animal which in touch with the earth and the cycles of nature, it is a powerful guide to support physical and emotional healing. She said that the meaning of Bear is "The spirit of the bear indicates it's time for healing or using healing abilities to help self or others"
This ideology matches with our purpose which to help people heal, so that's the story behind Joey the bear!
Since this application is intended for young adults, we created the Bear cuter and bubbly like this to attract our target users.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
This project was a very meaningful and fun journey for me as I could explore many things from myself. It wasn't a smooth one since the members came from very different backgrounds. We had to adapt to each other's work pace and way of thinking for a while. Moreover, since this project was done fully remotely, the challenge of course was in the discussions. Many times we go back to our result of discussion over again to ensure that everyone has the same understandings. However, we all take part in voicing our own opinion during the development process. We also use CBL framework documented inside Notion to help us determine our decision, and also we always do votings to come up with a final decision.
I really learned a lot about communication during this project. I learned on how to voice my opinion in a more effective way so people can understand. I learned on how to persuade people with my idea based on the data, not just assumptions. Frankly, there were ups and downs during this project and some features were going to be taken out. I understand that features should be what the user really needs. However, we also have to think about what can make our product different and what's unique from our product. As long as there is a user testing result that support the idea and other supportive data, it's worth to give it a try.
I also explored a lot in design, mainly in the user experience part. There were a lot of iterations until we could get this final result. I was also mainly responsible in creating the user testing plan. Even though my role was UI/UX Designer, I involved a lot in the business part because I have a high interest in Data Analysis and Business.
I created the presentation review to the Apple Team together with my fellow teammate named Shafira Amalia. We both wrote the script and designed the keynote.
Me and Shafira were also the one who created 5-min video explanation about Joey down below.
And that's me as the presenter!
Please kindly check it out for more details of Joey application demo.
And don't forget to check Joey out on the App Store! (https://apps.apple.com/id/app/joey-self-care-buddy/id1538988302)
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