Stoic. is a daily self-care journal and a mental health tracker app that teaches how to use Stoicism to stress less and be happier. It also analyzes your emotive influences and gives you insights on how to be happier and more productive. “The app is like a best friend who knows everything about you and wants to help you understand why you are feeling a certain way.”

STOIC.

Introducing a new feature to the journaling experience: custom daily activities and custom journal reflection questions.

ROLES

As part of my UI/UX Design Course, I assumed the following roles in designing a new feature for this app:

  • User Experience (UX) Designer

  • Interaction (IxD) Designer

  • User Interface (UI) Designer

DELIVERABLES

Interaction Design:
High-fidelity interactive prototypes for key tasks on iOS

UX/UI Design:

  • App feature analysis

  • One-on-one interviews

  • Persona

  • Task flows

  • High-fidelity mockups and prototypes

  • Usability tests and findings

PROJECT SPECS

Duration: 2 Weeks (80 Hours)

Tools:

  • Figma

  • Maze (Testing)

PROPOSED FEATURE

Improve the user experience by allowing users to add their own custom daily focus and custom prompts to the journaling feature. This will allow for a more personalized experience for users who want to track specific activities and how they affect mood over time. It can also allow for some autonomy in what prompts they’d like to answer during journaling.

DESIGN APPROACH

  • Design the added features so as to keep complete consistency with the app’s current UI patterns.

  • Ability for users to complete these tasks in as few screens as possible.

PROCESS OVERVIEW

01
RESEARCH

FINDINGS

  1. Journaling, especially with prompts, are an important part of user engagement within the app. (Based off interviews and reviews.)

  2. There is still room to improve the user experience of journal entries and prompts. (Based off reviews.)

  3. Journal-entry preferences differ from user to user. For example, some users likes random prompts, others like specific prompts to specific focuses, others completely skip prompted questions.

  4. Competitors offer ways to customize the journaling experience.

METHODOLOGIES

  1. One-on-one interviews helped me understand how users were using the app and what were some of their most important/liked features.

  2. Competitive research allowed me to get a better understanding of what features were currently available in other journaling/mood-tracking apps.

  3. App Store Review Synthesis allowed me to gather insight into existing users’ likes, dislikes, frustrations, and requests.

  • Stoic sets itself apart through its simplicity. Figuring out how to allow for customization while keeping the experience simple and sophisticated is key.

USER PERSONA:

After synthesizing all my research I created a user persona to help guide me through the rest of the process of adding a feature to the app.

02
INTERACTION DESIGN

TASK FLOWS

WIREFRAMES

Sketches

Coming up with ways to add as little as possible to the experience and the interface but still accomplish the feature adds.

ADD A CUSTOM ACTIVITY

03 TESTING & PROTOTYPE

Original: Pre-populated activities with
no option to add a custom activity.

Test

Added: “Other” button to add a
new custom activity.

ADD A CUSTOM REFLECTION QUESTION

Original: Empty journal page without the option to insert custom reflection question.

Added: Thought bubble icon button to
insert a custom reflection question.

EDIT A CUSTOM REFLECTION QUESTION

Original: Personalize Your Day screen

Added: “Your Reflection Questions” to be able to add/edit custom questions.

HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPE

Due to time constraints, I jumped straight into high-fidelity prototyping and tested my solutions. Testing was quite successful; Most tasks were completed with a success rate of 75% or higher. My goal was to add as little as possible and treat the feature as something that could hypothetically be updated in a later version.

NEXT STEPS

Usability Improvements:

  • Ability to edit/delete custom activities. Got some feedback about being able to delete a custom activity. In my mind, it was important to keep an archive of activities for posterity’s sake - to keep it in history. But for a better experience, it might be worth allowing users the ability to edit and delete these activities.

  • New Feature Add Announcement- Creating a popup announcement of the new features with an optional tutorial walking through the new features.

  • Continued testing on where to locate the list of custom activities and/or reflection questions within

LESSONS
LEARNED

  • This was a wonderful lesson in studying an app from front to back. As a user of the app, there were small things that I hadn’t noticed before this case study.

  • I learned how challenging it is to keep an app simple and minimalist, especially when you are adding to it.

  • I learned from one of my interviewees (who is a UI/UX designer) the importance of designing for different user emotions. The example he used was that he used an empty journal page for a “mind dump” when he was frustrated - convergent. On the other hand, he used reflection questions when his mind was clear and it a better state - divergent.

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