THE CHALLENGE

Recently, I participated in my first designathon alongside a team of 3 fellow designers. Over the course of 36 hours, we were challenged to define, ideate, and prototype an app idea pertaining to a health/fitness concern. 

While brainstorming potential ideas, we noticed a recurrent theme: the emotional and mental well-being of college students. College students are easily overwhelmed by copious amounts of stress and disorganized thoughts. However, they struggle to give themselves a break or take time out of their day for self-reflection, which cultivates toxic cycles of anxious thinking. We asked:

How might we design a tool that encourages self-reflection to help college students gain a greater sense of clarity, control, and self-awareness?

THE SOLUTION

An intuitive journal experience that guides users to declutter their thoughts, process their emotions, and track personal progress.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM SCOPE

To understand how college students dealt with overwhelming thoughts, we conducted 9 phone interviews and 14 surveys.

‍We found that students gained clarity and grounding from voicing their thoughts out loud instead of mulling them over in their heads.

USE CASES

After hearing our audience's pain points and analyzing their needs and wants, our product should be able to provide the following experiences:

• The user is able to build a healthy habit of reflecting to make them feel better

• The user is able to talk it out, and have a moment of grounding or reflection of their thoughts using our design when unable to access immediate support from people around them

• Our design can act as a sounding board and provide clarity for people to see and re-evaluate their thoughts out in the open

• Over time, users can gain a greater sense of self-awareness of the trends in their thought patterns, and make actionable goals to improve their mental health
  
  

IDEATION

drawing from our user research, we began to ideate features that would be engaging, encourage self-reflection, and maintain user retention.

After weighing ideas based on criteria such as relevance to our objective, user needs, and innovation, we synthesized the following list of prioritized features, and began sketching out what they might look like.

CORE FEATURES

REST & REFLECT

🌻 Working within strict time constraints

We maximized and streamlined our time throughout our design thinking process within the 36-hour limit by planning what we wanted to get done by the hour. I learned how to collaborate and communicate efficiently with a team, facilitate discussions surrounding constructive criticism, and achieve our goals under a time crunch.

🌻 What I'd do differently…

We were unable to conduct thorough usability testing given the strict timeline of the designathon. Given the opportunity, I would've liked to create empathy maps, conduct competitive analysis, refine our user research outline, conduct more user interviews, and conduct user testing of our prototype. This would allow us to fine tune our solution so that we can deliver maximum value to users.

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📍 This was my first time participating in a designathon, and I was so impressed at how we managed to pull all of this together in a day! I happen to be in a bit of a creative block lately, so this was a really good reminder of the joy I find in challenging myself and designing creative solutions, and why I do what I do :)