QUICKJOT
IN4MATX 132 Project
January 2024 - March 2024
CONTEXT
Mental health is becoming a more prevalent topic in our society, leading to the search for ways to cope with conflicts in our daily lives. One of the most common ways to cope is journaling, allowing people to organize their thoughts and make better sense of the events in their lives. However, with young adults having very hectic schedules–often balancing school, work, family, friends, and hobbies–it is difficult to find the time to sit down and write down all of their thoughts.
How might we efficiently showcase the mental health benefits of journaling and the positive effects of habit-building to young adults?
IDEATION
We know there are plenty of journaling apps available to the public, so we decided to conduct a competitive analysis to view each of the apps’ strong points.
We found that a majority of these apps had strengths in being very simple and organized. We found the most appealing apps to be the ones that had minimal features and were more straight to the point in journaling.
INTERVIEWS
We then turned to interviewing our target audience—young adults—to collect data on how young adults handle stress, stay motivated, and if they are interested in journaling.
KEY INSIGHTS
Users like simple journaling apps—too many features can be overwhelming
Users can struggle with knowing what to write and where to start
Users struggle with setting aside time to journal due to their busy schedules
Users often struggle to find motivation to journal—need more appealing features/accountability
Our key insights allowed us to start ideating how to meet our users’ needs—which include journaling with ease and staying motivated. We soon took our ideas to paper and created various sketches for our application.
SKETCHES
Our main sketches revolved around a calendar view, since we knew we wanted to visually display the days of the month for users to keep track of their previous journal entries.
Low-fidelity sketches of various features
To keep the user engaged and motivated to journal, we sketched various ideas such as having a “virtual pet”—who would grow and stay happy if the user journaled everyday. Other features included a timer for quick journaling, a mood tracker, and customization features for journal entries.
MID FIDELITY
With our mid-fidelity designs, we were able to gain a better visualization of our app and narrowed down our features. We realized we were straying away from the user’s need for a simple and easy to use application. With this, we decided to keep our feature of customizable journal entries as the main way to keep users engaged.
Mid-fidelity wireframes of customization feature
With this feature, users are not required to customize their entries, but can do so to keep a more detailed log of their day with images and checklists. This accounts for the users who only want to journal down their thoughts and the users who would like to make their entries more detailed and suited for them.
FIRST ITERATION
The first iteration of our app had multiple ways to create a journal entry—from typing directly into a box, to tapping on a button to create an entry. We also utilized various fonts to make the application feel more like a journal, which is why we chose handwriting fonts.
First iteration of high-fidelity prototype
However, as we conducted user testing—tasking the user to create a journal entry from the homepage along with tasking the user to journal with the prompt generator—we ran into a few critiques that went against our user needs.
Our key takeaways were to focus on simplifying features and prioritizing readability over aesthetics. We then used our feedback to construct our final prototype and completed our app: QuickJot.
REFLECTION
After 10 weeks of working on this project with my team, one of my biggest takeaways was the importance of planning and ideation. With this project being an assignment for a class, we submitted weekly deliverables to ensure we were on track. This helped me to stay motivated and showed that by planning out each stage of the design process early on, we would save a lot of time towards the end since we already planned out what we were doing in the later steps.
I am very thankful to my professor for giving us a space to create a prototype from our own ideas and for giving us creative freedom with this assignment. I would also like to extend a thank you to my 4 other teammates for the team bond we formed and our growth together as designers! <3
.png)
