Habitature
Where building healthy habits also builds up flourishing flower habitats!
Team Members
Stacey Lei
Amber Louie
Rupinder Dhaliwal
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
Feb 2023
Skills
Prototyping
Visual Design
Interaction Design
Project Type
2 Week Sprint
OVERVIEW
The challenge to create a mental health app.
Kickstarting the Spring 2023 semester, UX@Berkeley drove our creativity through a 2-week design sprint focused on one task: boosting users’ happiness. How do you get there? It was all up to our research and creativity.
Put into teams of 4, we were let loose and expected to return with a high fidelity prototype of an app that brings happiness. Guiding us throughout the design sprint was the given HMW statement:
How might we we develop a mobile app that focuses on improving mental wellness for its users?
RESEARCH
Discovering what brings individuals happiness.
My team and I explored different avenues of what can bring joy to people. We came together with different research articles to discuss activities and systems that bring joy and translate well into a mobile format. Activities we decided were worth looking into include:
Going Outdoors Daily: Health and mental benefits like improved mood and increased energy levels
A Constant Schedule: Increases productivity and peace of mind for lives
Journaling: Helps individuals destress and emotionally release
We realized our activities could function with one another in the same app. Beyond our initial research, we decided to look into these activities through user surveys to gauge user tendencies and desires including questions such as “What entices you to go outside when it’s not mandatory?” or “What motivates you to journal?”
FINDINGS
Evaluating our research of happiness
Our survey obtained a total of 40 responses which netted us eye opening findings towards our user research process.
MOTIVATING REWARD SYSTEMS
Over 70% of answers concerning all activities and systems included some sort of reward or reward system behind their motivations
NIGHTLY JOURNALING
Over 95% of individuals who journal, do so at night to reflect back on their day.
ROUTINELY ACTIVITIES
40% of responses expressed desire to commit to activities like journaling or outside time but don’t due to lack of habit and time commitment.
IDEATION
Developing app functionalities that hope to boost users’ mental health
After discussing our insights, we individually began to ideate some systems. I began to do mind mapping to tie in our discoveries concerning reward systems and commitment to activities. The bolded ideas represent what our team went through with for prototyping.
My mind-mapping produced the following functions our team would move forward with for our app:
Habit System: The app's main purpose would be to reward users for completing tasks in the form of daily habits. To make this system effective, a robust incentive is crucial, which leads to…
Personal Gardens: Users have personalized plant gardens, in which its health reflects their habits. Plant health depends on daily habit completion. Research on the positive impact of nature inspired this system. We aimed for a cozy app aesthetic, so the garden thematic perfectly captured the experience we wanted.
My other team members also suggested these features that we also developed:
Journaling Tab: Users can write about their daily emotions to a daily prompter. Journaling lets people release their emotional thoughts, and our tab provides that mental release after productive days.
Avatar System: An outlet of self-expression allowing users to customize their appearance. Research states users feel a sense of joy seeing their virtual selves obtains rewards. An avatar system was the perfect way to immerse users into really tending a garden.
PROTOTYPING
Nurturing our ideas into life!
After we settled on our primary features, it was time to finally produce low-fidelity prototypes to visualize the experience! Each of us worked on a different frame to maximize the little time we had (4 days left). I worked on the frame for individual plants.
Plant Life Tab
Journaling Tab
Avatar Tab
Our most major revision during the sketching phase was our implementation of a mobile-friendly garden.
We decided we needed something more condensed to maximize screen area. We also converted our garden concept to 3D, a more interactive and immersive medium for users.
Garden Sketch
By the time we finished discussing our low-fi prototyping, we had around 2 days left. Though we wished we could’ve taken more time to develop mid-fi prototypes, we had no choice but to get straight to develop our final designs.
Figuring out a name for our app was the hardest challenge as none of us could think of anything throughout the ideation process… until the name Habitature clicked in my head! We were essentially helping users grow a habitat of flowers through developing healthy habits, so Habitature felt like the perfect encapsulation of our app, aesthetically and functionally. My team members immediately loved the name and went through with the idea.
Presenting Habitature!
From tending plants through good habits to journaling, Habitature aims to encourage the healthy lifestyle you want.
REFLECTION
Designing in a fast-paced setting.
Out of all the design sprints I’ve done, this is the one I felt had the most potential and honestly wished I could go back to. Immediate flaws I noticed looking back are:
Garden could be more prototype friendly and needs a zoom in feature
More competitive analysis on colors and typography to make the interface more aesthetically pleasing
Features needed deeper exploration, such as what lifestyle habits a user may want to have
Despite my urge to fill in our gaps of abstraction, I want to keep this project true to what it was: a design sprint in which we research, ideate, and create with the little time we had. Habitature stays as my team’s test of creativity in an accelerated environment. In the end, I’m immensely proud of our innovative approach of bringing happiness to individuals!
Check out my other work here!
Leading a product rehaul to create an accessible display of astronomy datasets and analytics.
PRODUCT DESIGN • DESKTOP • CLIENT WORK