UNIVERSUM

"All things, as a whole, the universe."

I designed an all-in-one journaling app that 90% of my surveyor and interviewee want to use.

Reflect

Record

Explore

DISCOVER

Before I began this project, I am curious about 2 things:

1. Do people want to keep a record of their life and thoughts?

2. What hinders them to do so?

To answer these 2 questions, user research is necessary

Survey

20 Responses

Interview

5 interviewee

- Main Takeaways -

A

A majority of participants (17/20) wants to record their life, but only 3/17 of them writes their journal daily.

C

Most users (15/17) want to read others random thoughts/journey but some of them (6/17) feels uncomfortable sharing their own thoughts.

B

"Forgetting about what they want to write" (13/17) and "don't have time" (10/17) are two problems that affect most users with keeping a journal.

D

Though participants want to read others thoughts, they worry about seeing inappropriate messages.

PERSONA

DESIGN

To match the idea of a universe as well as attracting the gen z population, I want my design to convey a futuristic and mysterious feeling.

I have experimented with the cyber-punk, Baugasm, holographic and many different styles, but it was hard to strike the balance between making the design cool and making it user-friendly (i.e., less distracting).

In the end, I created different shapes (i.e., circles being sliced differently) to represent different planets (matching the idea of the universe) and applied gradient colour to them to make them pop out from the dark background, but keeping the rest of the design organized and simple to ensure a better user experience.

WIREFRAME

Function 1: Respond to prompt (publicly/privately)

To solve the problem of "Forget about what to write" and "Don't know what to write," I organized a set of prompt cards that ask users to reflect on their life, generate ideas, note down motivational messages, planning for the future and many more.

Different kinds of prompts are categorized into "past," "present," and "future." Limited description is given for each categorization to convey a sense of exploration.

Users can answer with text, voice transcribed text and drawing.

They can also choose to post publicly (anonymously) or privately.

Function 2: Explore others response

To solve the problem of "Worry about seeing inappropriate messages," I created the "hide" function so that users can hide posts that disturbs them. This function is effective to deal with bad user behaviour without involving a professionals to deal with reported messages, therefore more cost-effective.

Users can also "save" a post or "write" a response to the prompt that they find interesting.

Function 3: Quickly add a new message

To solve the problem of "Don't have time to write a journal," I created the "quick add" function and set the default responding method to "voice," so that participants can talk to their phone and seeing their messages transcribed to text.

To solve the problem of "Sometimes I don't want to share my own messages," participants can choose to post their messages privately/publicly (anonymous).

Function 3: Create a prompt card

Function 4: Analysis

Users can check their weekly/monthly entry analysis and see changes overtime.

- NEXT STEP -

Usability Test

Iterate