Journey

Many people have journaled in the past, but very few continue with the hobby after the first few entries due to lack of motivation or simply not knowing what to write.
A lot of people find it easy to talk about their problems with others, so the solution is simple: Journey is an AI-powered journaling assistant that treats journaling like a conversation.

Roles

Team Size: 4

I assumed the following roles designing this website:

Project Manager
UX Designer
UX Researcher
UI Designer

Deliverables

Responsive Design, High-fidelity prototypes of both desktop and mobile websites.

Competitive Analysis 
Empathy Map
Value Proposition Canvas 
Customer Journey Map
Storyboard

Project Specifications

Duration: 3 weeks

Tools:

Figma
FigJam
Google Drive
Adobe Photoshop
Clip Studio Paint
Adobe Illustrator

Overview

In a post-covid era, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Even as children, many have taken to the concept of having a diary, or journaling to get their thoughts out of their head and onto a page. However, for most people, journaling is hard to keep up with. Despite the many mental health benefits of journaling, many people fall off of the hobby. Journey seeks to bridge the rift by prompting users and continuing to talk to them as they write, treating their journaling session like a conversation.

Problems

Many people have journaled in the past, but very few continue with the hobby after the first few entries due to lack of motivation or simply not knowing what to write.

Proposed Solution

A lot of people find it easy to talk about their problems with others, so the solution is simple: Journey is an AI-powered journaling assistant that treats journaling like a conversation.

I. Research

User Interviews

Conducted 8 interviews, each with a separate set of questions for those who journaled currently and those who did not-- from there we were able to determine the root cause of why many people struggle with the hobby, and why it attracts people to continue.

Survey Responses

With a survey distributed online, we found that:

60% of users do not currently keep a journal.
75% have tried journaling in the past.
60% cite lack of motivation for their biggest challenge.

“I think it's a really good outlet to work through feelings. I think it's also just good to connect more with yourself. And I definitely think that more people should utilize journaling instead of just like keeping their feelings locked up. I think it just really helps you know, not spiral and not just shove things away.” - Cedar

Findings

The biggest thing we were able to take away from all of our research is that the people who do journal tend to see an increase in their overall mental health and mood. However, in most cases, even with people who currently keep a journal, people find difficulty in figuring out what to write about, the blank page looking overwhelming for the average user.

Determining Root Cause

After the team came back from our interviews, we synthesized the research into categories using an affinity diagram, and determined what it is the user felt through an empathy map.

We were able to divide the users into two groups: People who are currently journaling and continuing the hobby, and those who have just started and want to find ways to keep up with it. Thus did we come up with our user personas: Abby Jones, who journals quite frequently, and Kelly Lancester, who has only just started journaling. From both of their situations, we found that the most focused approach would be to address the mutual needs of both Abby and Kelly. The main pain points of which are: Struggling to find what to write about, and keeping themself motivated throughout the process, as well as helping the user disperse stress through the use of journaling and mindfulness.

Understanding the Competition

A competitive analysis was also put together, so we could understand what edge the other journaling apps to ensure that Journey's focus was unique and had something none of the others had.

For Journey to stand out above the rest, it needed to be simple and easy to pick up, but it also needed to form a connection to our user. While many of the apps offered analytics or a straightforward design, we noticed a gap in the market: the onboard AI assistants offered little in the way of motivating the user to journal and continue writing their entries.

II. Definition & Ideation

With Abby and Kelly's needs in mind, we tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the average user of this app. What does their current situation look like? What do our users go through, and what does our own journaling journey looks like, as people who also maintain the hobby? How much does it actually help us in the long run? All these questions and more went into our User Journey map, helping us organize a solution.

From there, it was easy enough to determine the ideal situation for the customer, and I drew out this storyboard.

Understanding the direction of where we wanted to go with it, and the culmination of all of our research, we finally were able to glean our user insight:

Users need prompts for journal writing due to lack of motivation to write, caused by having a lack of direction when starting a new entry.

There was so much we wanted to do at the start, with making the app voice-responsive, the ability to add stickers and decorate your journal, customizable color schemes, and having the app give you a TLDR summary of each journal entry. All of these were amazing features right off the bat, but it began to muddy the process of what it is we exactly wanted to do: help people remain motivated with the journaling journey.

Figuring out what features and problems to solve was key to narrowing down which features to focus on, so the first things we chose to incorporate were the high impact features:

An AI that continues to talk to the user as they journal, to keep them engaged with writing the entry.
The ability to write & organize journal entries.
When not knowing what to write about, the user should be able to select a prompt to write about.

With the core of our app in place, it was time to start prototyping.

III. Prototyping

One of the biggest things we wanted to keep in mind with the site was to keep it relaxing, easy on the eyes, and easy to use. Opening Journey for the first time should be as intuitive as opening a traditional journal. It should be clean and fresh like the blank canvas of a fresh sheet of paper. We took some time putting together a moodboard to nail down the aesthetics of what we wanted, and we ended up agreeing on a dreamlike quality that welcomed and relaxed the user.

We decided to keep to a space color palette and committed by making our mascot, Journey, be a shooting star in the sky. The idea of the app itself was to keep it as analog-looking as possible without too much to overwhelm the viewer. The aesthetic we chose was a primarily "floating through the clouds" theme, with softer-looking font choices. This did end up having mixed reviews with the audience regarding our color palette feeling far too feminine. Within the scope of the project, we were unable to incorporate this, but a way we looked into solving this was the incorporation of multiple color schemes, or a customizable color scheme. This was one of the features we had to cut down on to meet the project deadline. In a future iteration, we knew such a color scheme would be incorporated.

Each of us sketched out different parts of our user flow, as well as a homepage. All of us, with our own ideas, decided to take a vote on which options we liked the most and combined it to create the final sketches.

Our first wireframes were very faithful to the original sketches, an in doing so, we created two basic flows with responsive web design, one for mobile and one for the desktop version of the app. We recreated the two flows described earlier in the case study and gave it to users to test.

After conducting 6 user tests, we were able to gather important data that influenced our mid-fi's going forward. While each task was able to be completed, the user needed instruction to know that they were done with certain tasks, especially the writing an entry task, which lacked feedback to let the user know they had finished the task. Additionally, some of the buttons were very unclear and needed to be adjusted, and features that we at first loved in sketches, didn't pan out in testing as particularly necessary, such as the Mindfulness Goals feature. Additionally, on the mobile entry page, the toolbar was very difficult to use. Another problem we came across was users mentioning that they were confused by being asked to sort their entry before starting writing.

If there was even issues with ensuring the user could seamlessly complete an entry and simple app navigation, it was clear to us that a lot of the ways we communicated with the user was unclear. Things needed to change, so we built a brand new navigation moving on into Mid-Fi, and cleared up a lot of the unnecessary clutter. We also added a way to manually save and sort your entries.

Another round of usability testing was had. After doing 6 more tests with our Mid-Fi pass, all tasks were able to be completed, but there were still a few issues to work out, namely: users wanted more feedback to know that an entry was saved, and users thought it would be more intuitive to create a journal entry from within the journals itself. As a result, moving into hi-fi, we added multiple different pathways to sort journal entries.

Even with our hi-fi design, we still had a lot of work to do; while we had added an autosave feature, the fact that there was a button to save at the bottom, when we meant to communicate "sort", made it seem like the app would not save your drafts. Additionally, users were concerned that the color scheme was geared to a more feminine audience, and thus would alienate those who prefer a more masculine or neutral color scheme. This lent credence to the idea that in future iterations, we would want the option to include more customization like color palettes to the app.

IV. Conclusion

Further Improvements

Voice journaling
Additional themes and customization
Entry summary generation
Journaling templates.
Stickers, washi tape, and other ways to decorate each entry.

Lessons Learned

Try not to add too many features to start, feature creep is a real thing and needs to be moderated for the timeframe.
There were a lot of ideas in the beginning that were too big for the scope of the project and muddled the core idea of the app-- a lot of ideas were scrapped.
Design choices were unintuitive for testers when moving to Hi-Fi, fixed by offering the user multiple pathways to accomplish a task.