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 journal, leading to many not reaping the benefits of this way of coping.

We know there are plenty of journaling apps available to the public, so we decided to conduct a competitive analysis to view the strong points of various apps. The apps we selected for our competitive analysis are all fairly popular—with thousands of ratings over 4.0 stars. We decided on these apps because we felt they would give us the most information about features to include and not include within a successful journaling app.

Utilizing both our findings and personal thoughts about journaling, my team brainstormed a variety of ideas and organized them into an affinity diagram. We categorized ideas based on similarities to ensure our insights were easier to digest and create ideas from.

Categorizing our ideas revealed observations from inspiration for features to include in our app—such as encouraging users to journal with changing prompts—to factors we did not realize affected users' interest in journal apps—including cultural influences and differing coping mechanisms to address stress. With these insights in mind, we started to draft sketches to solidify our app's direction.

Our initial sketches were very different from each other because we all tried to incorporate different findings from our affinity diagram. 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.

However, our sketches mainly 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. Since our sketches had inconsistencies with one another, we decided to narrow down our concept through referencing our original problem statement and interview responses.

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.

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.

Our users noticed redundancies in the app and also had trouble with readability of the fonts we chose. 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.