Bloom
A mental health journaling app for promoting healthy habits
Summary
Bloom is a creative app that creates a supportive environment by helping people create positive habits within their lifestyles. The primary goal of this health app is to give college students an opportunity to find hobbies and healthy habits to promote a healthy work life balance in times of stress.
Disciplines
Mobile Design UX Research
UI Design Prototyping
Team
Clara Yoo
Terrie Joo
Rachel Kim
Problem Scope
As we get busier, it gets harder to maintain and sustain healthy habits. Especially in college, many students lack the motivation to want to continue their habits because of forgetfulness, business, and/or laziness. We wanted to create an app that helps motivate people to maintain and begin healthy habits because they are an important aspect to well-being. Our primary focus was to create a convenient, affordable and personalized approach to health, taking into account the neglect people put towards mental health.
Research
To begin, we did research on different aspects of healthy habits and how it can improve mental health. This was essential for us to determine what way we can create an app appropriate for our user audience.
We wanted to primarily look at statistics and methods people try to learn and maintain a work life balance during stress. In addition, we expanded our research to the causes of stress and different ways students tried to cope with hardships in college.
Interview Highlights
We interviewed a diverse group of college students to get a deeper understanding of the roots of the problem and how they wanted to better their habits, if any. We explored different struggles college students face, as feedback to explore a variety of ways we can create active solutions to better student well-being.
"Because of my busy schedule, I rarely have time to try to focus on my well-being. I sometimes lose my focus and forget how to create better habits for myself."
"I think that I never even think about how to create better habits because I'm stuck in the endless cycles where I'm on a constant grind."
"I actively see the growing changes in mental health and well-being in college, where people don't prioritize it because of the stigma centered around mental health."
"Coming into college I realized how important health is, but it's hard to maintain a healthy routine because personally, I think I lost focus on my own health and was too focused on college life: socials, academics, creating an unhealthy lifestyle."
Key Insights
Exploring the Problem
From what we heard from various students, we discovered:
1. Students don't know how to create a healthy lifestyle.
Students have indicated how difficult it is to focus on methods to create a healthy lifestyle or get ideas of how to start. To begin they express how busy they are to do so, and because of their pre-occupied mind, they don't know where to start.
2. Stress and workload negatively effect their well-being.
As students face more difficult transitions from high school to college due to the differences in environment and workload, student express how it's harder to properly take care of themselves, whether that's through food consumption, physical health and/or mental health. Some students have mentioned stories where they are over loaded with work that they don't have time to do things that they enjoy, so they start to lose that part of themselves.
3. Habits are harder to maintain during college.
As stated above, time management becomes increasingly harder as students primarily focus on academic success. Students have said they lost interest in keeping healthy habits or creating new ones because of the lack of time efficiency.
In response to the information we gathered, my team wanted to target different ways healthy lifestyles can be maintained, especially during college when things get overwhelming. As habits, reinforce healthy patterns, we wanted to create an easy, accessible and fun app that would attract students' attention, whilst motivating them to continue their habits. Thus, we wanted our app to primarily be focused on creating and maintaining habits.
Ideation
Our primary goal when creating a wireframe for our app was to design an easy, accessible program that highlighted what we wanted to target: tracking habits.
We decided on a few factors:
(1) An incentive
(2) Tracking their habits and mood
(3) A reminder
(4) A visual representation of their progress.
Keeping these things in mind we centered our app around plants. We thought it was important to incorporate current trends such as how students are increasingly interested in plant decoration because it creates interest amongst our users.
To do so, we wanted to draw parallels in plant growth and positive progress toward one's habits. We illustrated this by creating a plant that grows into a flower as the user progresses with their habit.
In addition, It has been scientifically proven that 25 days is approximately enough time to create a concrete habit. Within those 25 days, as the user continues to progress towards that end goal, a plant, of their choice, will grow as a way to motivate and draw a user's attention.
Design Studio
When keeping these components in mind, we implemented these components into a simple rough draft to get an idea of what we were looking for.
We created the basic frames such as the main homepage, the calendar that tracks the users' habits and mood, and the flower that would be found when focusing on a habit.
We came into some challenges because we weren't sure what was the best way to visualize a tracker and if a calendar was the most effective way to do that. On top of that we weren't sure how we wanted to include the habits onto the calendar, taking into account the space for each individual habit and the design that would best organize these categories. Below is the preliminary sketch we attempted, in order to get an overarching view of what we were trying to produce.
Wireframing
As we only had 24 hours to create a design, we created brief wireframes of the entrance and exit points we wanted to implement in our app. We focused on the log-in and sign up frames, in addition to the main screens of creating a habit, adding that to a calendar and creating a journal.
From ongoing research of how different applications try to target positive mental health habits, we realized that an important component that we were missing was a creative space for the user to comfortably reflect on their progress. This could range from a written diary entry or a more visual representation of that day/habit through a picture. We believed that through experience and reviews, having the option to have that creative space broadens the scope of personalization. From what we gathered, we were able to finalize another rough demonstration of the different components we wanted for our app through wireframes. In this step we wanted to get a better sense of usability and accessibility to see if the structure of our app was best suitable for our target audience and purpose.
Iteration
We performed 3 usability tests with current college students at UC Berkeley. We wanted to see if the user flow transitioned slowly and if the functionalities were accurately represented through our design. They went through the process from the login homepage, to where the users can journal their daily habits. From the feedback we received, we iterated through the design to improve the prototype. Additionally, we got feedback on our style guide and how that worked in parallel to the theme of our app.
Style Guide
Our design was inspired by creating a friendly and fun outlook. Our concept was primarily centered around plants to emphasize our app's purpose.
Logo
We created different prototypes of our logo and wanted to go for a minimalistic look that also encompassed our vision of plants. In response, we thought of the name "Bloom" to portray the idea of growth and new beginnings. A lot of the focus of a plant is the flower itself and the variety of colors and beauty it has. However we wanted to also show that growth and beauty takes part in the little steps that help us achieve this growth just like how the stem and leaves are an essential part of a flowers growth: that is we wanted the stem and leaves to be a central part of our logo.
Typography
We categorized the different fonts we wanted to use for our primary and secondary titles. To correspond the fonts with an easy-going, cute theme we used the font "Gluten" as the primary title and "ABeeZee" as our secondary titles. Below are the different fonts we were considering to use for our app.
Color Scheme
In terms of the color scheme, we wanted to be consistent with our logo: green. We chose a specific pastel green for our main background, that we felt was soothing and easy on the eyes. We wanted the colors to reflect our concept of "Bloom". We also tried to utilize positive colors that aligns with not only our brand but also our purpose.
Final Design
What We Learned
Thanks to my wonderful teammates, I was able to take part in a wonderful process of solving a social issue that I personally have seen people around me experiences. We were able to put our ideas together to empathize with the problem and implement it within our lives.
Lessons of Iterations during a time crunch
Throughout the process we learned a lot about how we can implement everyday social issues into a design through iteration. There were many times where we had to implement a broad concept into a design that would target different users needs, and it felt stressful during a time crunch. However, it taught us the value of learning how to develop an idea concisely and efficiently when it needs to be done quickly.
Research is Critical
In addition, capturing the different solutions and finding one that we really wanted to focus on for this social issue was something we learned how to do through research. Although we lacked time, I learned how research is just as important as the design process. Without getting the research done, I think we would've run into a lot of problems in creating a design focused on our users needs, and most importantly not be able to come up with an idea. Although research can take a good portion of the process, the time we spend on it, allows us to build a valuable resource we are able to utilize during the design phase.
