By The Serenity Circle
Project Brief
For this assignment, we were expected to focus on a specific civic or social issue and create a mobile application that provides a solution to the unique issue. By working with a group of six designers, we visualized and brainstormed different ideas to create a solution with a digital product and balance the complexity of merging an application into a platform for a community. As a group, we were responsible for prototyping an app on Figma while each individual was responsible for focusing on a specific feature that impacted the overall objective. To ensure the design of the application is cohesive, our group met weekly to understand deadlines and communicate our contributions to the application. By starting in a brainstorming phase, it evolved into design exploration, production, prototyping, and user testing of our application.
Deconstructing our Project
Our team, The Serenity Circle, focused on creating a digital solution that would impact mental health. With access to resources being expensive and difficult to approach in our society, we believe that having those resources in the palm of your hands at all times is a simple and affordable way to support mental health needs.
Our target audience was Gen Z and Millennials, as we found the growth of our digital age to impact these individuals the most. By empathizing with the fact that we understand digital products the most, those applications have often consumed our emotions, humor, and social standards. This is why we wanted to have a refreshing solution to identify and vocalize those emotions with the familiarity and accessibility of an application.
My Feature
The feature that I contributed to our application was called “Retail Therapy”. Retail therapy was the shopping feature on our application that was focused on celebrating your accomplishments and using your virtual pet to showcase new looks.
Within this feature, there were three areas: the shop, the closet, and the coins. Within the shop, users could use their hard-earned coins to dress up their virtual pet or fancy up their virtual environment. The closet held all of your inventory and gave you the option to switch out looks/accessories. The coins section showed you not only your balance but all the options you have to gain more rewards through working on your mental health goals through other features on SereniPets.
I leveraged the competitive analysis portion of this project to research the purpose and vision behind this feature. Seeing what other applications had in their shopping section sparked the idea of celebrating the accomplishments made in the application to keep users coming back to continue their contribution to their mental health goals.
The Retail Therapy section was not a time to shop for your virtual pet, it was time for you to reflect on the accomplishments you made in other features and reward your progress. This idea was an item I centered my feature around.
Retail Therapy Home Shopping Checkout
Design Research and Planning
During every milestone of our project, we often reflected on the progress we had with research to pivot our next steps. We researched the impact an application could make on the mental health issues of Gen Z and Millennials and found amazing ways to make an impact. By understanding a competitive analysis we were able to grasp the competition as well as identify what makes our product different from others on the market. This is what drove our idea to make sure this resource is affordable and celebratory because we often found competition having drop-off rates for long-term use. Leveraging this research identified our vision and is the root component that supports our project guidelines.
Through a competitive analysis, we observed three different mental health applications and were able to deconstruct the design to identify what makes our application unique to the industry.
Headspace
Pokipet
Wysa
To support the foundation of our prototype I created a flowchart to understand our expected flows and key elements to build off of. This stage supported our vision of the expected user flow by gaining feedback and collaborating with other features within our application.
Flow Chart
After creating my features flowchart, I crafted low-fidelity designs to visualize all user needs and connect them throughout the entire application. Building off of the low-fidelity designs came our high-fidelity product for our final drafting stage.
Low Fidelity Designs
Final Prototype
Individual Feature Screens
Welcome to the first prototype of SereniPets!
Click full screen to view in best environment
