Scrapbook

Research Process

On day one of the hackathon, my group and I brainstormed innovative ideas for a mobile application related to health. During this stage, I realized there aren’t many mobile applications that help with children’s mental health. I proposed that we create a mobile application that assists children evaluating their mental health.

One of our team members then conducted an interview with children’s parents to learn about the struggles children face when trying to express their emotions, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After conducting our research, we created user personas based on the information we collected and used it as a case study to help us create a working prototype.

Design Process

On day two of the hackathon, we collaborated on creating wireframes for each screen in the prototype. After creating wireframes with my team, I was in charge of the visual design of the application. I came up with the color scheme of the application as well as the fonts used. I was also incharge of creating the emoji illustrations made in Adobe Illustrator which are used for the emotion reflection journal. Since this is an app aimed towards children, the color scheme I made is very colorful and inspired by the Disney movie Inside Out. I appreciated the concept of the movie using basic emotions such as joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger and using colors to represent these emotions to young children, so I also wanted to integrate this concept in our visual design. I wanted to focus on refining the illustrations of the application, since our target audience are young children, it would be easier for them to understand visuals and pictures rather than words.

After solidifying the wireframes and the art direction, our team created a high fidelity prototype in Figma. While our team created a polished prototype, my job was to help with the interaction design within the app, and conducted user testing to ensure the application was functional.

Challenges

Initially, I wanted to implement a drag-and-drop feature for the emotion reflection journal screen, to create a more tactile experience for children. However, my team did not have enough time to implement this type of interaction, so I had to scale down the interaction to something more simple, which is a single-selection interaction. Since we wanted users to select more emotions if needed, we gave the user the option to select another emotion after going through the initial steps of the first emotion.

Reflection

Our project made it to the final round of judging, and gave the judges a good impression! Although we did not win anything in the end, Scrapbook was a fun UX/UI project to embark on with my teammates. Through this project, I was able to practice my UX/UI skills further, and gave me a better understanding on how to design interactions based on the pain paints of user personas.
If we were to move forward with this project in the future, we would look into conducting more user interviews with children and their parents/guardians to gain a larger perspective into what content is most applicable to this audience. We also thought it would be insightful to reach out to people with background knowledge in children’s psychology to give us more ideas on how to design user interactions.

Final Deliverables