Building a journaling app featuring an intelligent mood tracker
During my UX/UI design bootcamp at Ironhack, one of the project I enjoyed working on the most consisted in building from scratch a wellness tracking app. We had two weeks to work on it by ourselves, from user research to the delivery of an MVP.
1. But first, investigation time
On day 1, all I knew was that I wanted to build a journaling app. I started by launching a survey to explore this topic. Going through the results, I wondered for each learning: “to what extent can that be an opportunity for a new app?”. Because a survey can give many learnings, but if they don’t answer to any opportunity, they are just numbers without real value.
Two valuable insights came out from this survey:
- Many people do not journal due to time & discipline issues but they would like to do it.
- Heavy journal writers are strongly bonded to the idea of a paper notebook for journaling. Some of them use digital mediums here and there as a back-up, but the paper notebook remains their go-to medium.
At first glance, insight #1 seemed to come on a silver platter. People don’t write? Let’s make them write! With an app! But then I started to study the market of journaling apps… There are a decent number of them (Dayone, Journey Cloud, Grid Diary…). And obviously, they already have features to encourage people to write regularly (push notification, set alarm, writing tracker…). Here, the opportunity suddenly seemed less of an opportunity. As this way was clearly a dead-end, I started to study insight #2.
So what about insight #2? Why was it an opportunity to my eyes? Most of the respondents said they were writing in order to track their lives: in terms of memories & personal growth. As some persons tend to mix the mediums, my assumption was that for these people having all the data decentralized was a blocker to this personal tracking. Concretely: a person has some personal documentation in her phone’s notes, and in her paper journal, she has no means to centralize everything in the same space, and therefore no way to track properly her life. When looking at the competitor’s side, they are not doing much about this pain point. Writing directly in the app is the most common solution offered to the user. But this is totally ignoring the reality: heavy writers have an emotional bond to their paper notebook, that a keyboard would never replace! I realized there was a gap in the market that could be an opportunity for my project.
As the user is tracking his/her personal evolution, I thought relevant to make a benchmark of the mood-tracking app market as well. There, once again, it is saturated with many different features. But I realized that there was a gap here too: all of them ask the user to assess himself his/her mood (by a smiley, an adjective, a scale…). When I was working in consumer research I was always taught to believe “what people do rather than to what they say”, as it always brings more authentic & real insights. Therefore I realized that if I wanted my app to be innovative, there was a spot for me to use behavioral insights rather than asking users to rate their mood themselves.
2. Data collected, now let’s give life to it
After the investigation phase, I was clear-minded about the market, its opportunities, my user, his/her pain points. This is when I started to build my user persona & her user journey, these were two must-have to keep a clear vision all along my project in the next steps.
These led me to the following HMW:
How might we help Elisa to track her personal growth throughout all of her writings from different mediums?
3. Ideation, with a little help from my users
My HMW led me to several other questions… How to turn the paper notebook experience into digital, but without taking away its essence? How to enable Elisa to gather all her writing on one platform? How to help Elisa to track her mood and emotions in a behavioral way?
A respondent of the survey actually planted the seed in my mind by saying that she sometimes forces herself to transcript what she wrote from her phone to her paper journal. This transcription idea lit the light for me! My app will be based on a transcript system: Elisa will be able to take a photo of her journal pages then they would be automatically transcripted into text in the app. This will enable the centralization of all her journaling data without forcing her to give up to her beloved paper notebook format.
On the other hand, to help her keep track of her personal growth, I thought of an Artificial Intelligence system that would communicate with her to empower her. Typically, in my mind it would have looked like a little chatbot that would have sent messages saying “looked how you good you did that day, remember?”, “Last year, at the same day you wrote you felt so bad, look how far you’ve been and how better you feel now!”.
Once the first draft of the concept was clear for me, I tested it in 1.1 interviews with 7 different Elisa (in other words: with heavy journal writers who mix their mediums). The photo concept turned out to be liked and to answer well their pain point. However, the chatbot was judged intrusive, and most of the respondents were doubting the relevancy of the technology to be able to formulate relevant messages. When I saw that respondents rejected this idea, I shifted the interview into a co-creation mode. This turned out to be very insightful and at the end of the day, my new concept was born: an emotion dashboard. Here, I realized the power of co-creation that can bring you dramatically forwards! Thank you, user ;)
End of Day 3, my final concept was set. The app will provide two innovative features not yet offered by the competitors, and approved by a relevant target of users to provide a solution to the HMW:
- A camera will scan paper journal pages and will automatically transcript them as text. In addition, there will be the possibility to write directly in the app with the keyboard, or record voice messages. This will enable Elisa to keep on writing in her paper book, while centralizing all her data on the app. Each entry will be customizable with images, music, and location.
- An AI system will automatically identify the emotions of Elisa in her writings (via tonality, words, punctuation…). If she subscribes to a premium account she will have access to her emotions dashboard (with a wide range of positive and negative emotions) assessing their evolution throughout time, and the image, music and location related. This will enable Elisa to have a tracking of each of her emotions to assess her improvement in terms of personal growth.
The app will be named “V.”, as phonetically it sounds like the French word meaning “life” (“vie”).
Obviously, the app will be highly securized as the user shares very intimate data on it, that means no connexion with Google, Facebook or any social media, a charter where the company commits not to share the data, and a protection with a password to access the app.
4. Prototype, test, repeat
I decided to build my prototype following two different user flows in order to showcase the two added value of the app:
- Elisa takes a photo of a paper journal to get it transcripted
- Elisa checks her emotion dashboard
I created lo-fi, mid-fi, & hi-fi, in-between each stage I tested it with users to improve.
As for the look and feel and UI elements of the app, I wanted something very cosy and discreet that could make Elisa feel in a safe and caring space where she could share her personal information in full trust.
Below, the final prototype:
5. To conclude…
As this project was highly time sensitive (I only had two weeks to work on it), it was the occasion for me to learn how to manage timings. I worked in a very iterative way all along this project, going forth and back to the users to ask for their opinion & feelings. This turned out to be highly valuable, and I got passionated about it. However I had to force myself to stop the process sometimes (when I considered that the outcome was good enough), so that I could go for the next steps according to my planning without loosing myself in the iteration funnel (that can actually go on forever!). Obviously, if I had more time, I would have deepened even more the iteration via co-creation with the users.
A next step to take on this project would be to be considered from the development side on how to implement a handwriting transcription & AI system for this purpose. During the project, I had the opportunity to exchange with a specialist in this field who told me that it was possible, challenging, but possible. Obviously this would need to be studied carefully and worked on a lot. But I believe that thanks to these advanced featured, V. could make a difference and stand out from its competitors on the market.
