How do you mood?
Aster is a community mood tracking app to help young adults feel closer to their loved ones
ROLE
Product Designer
TIMELINE
12 Weeks
TOOLS USED
Figma, InVision
WHAT I DID
UX Research, UI Prototyping & Visual Branding
At a Glance
Challenges faced by overseas young adults
International students face various additional challenges. Homesickness combined with acculturational stress of all kinds, from social, academic to financial needs can easily become overwhelming, and in turn predisposes them to a well-being disadvantage.
The missing link between mental health and social media platforms
There has been a lot of attention given to developing effective communication tools, but the intersection between digital communication and emotional health is an avenue that is yet sufficiently explored.
The Problem
A user-centric mobile app serving as a mental health platform to help overseas young adults feel closer to their friends and family.
The Solution
How might we?
Synthesize a system to help overseas young adults to feel more emotionally connected to their friends and family?
01/ User Research
Objective
To gain insights on young adults (age 18-28) values and motivations behind seeking social support from their remote relationships, and how it affects their mental health.
Methods
Five 30-minutes interviews conducted through video or voice chat. Interviewees are asked 20 questions for a mix of quantitative and qualitative data.
Participant Criteria
Young Adults, between 18-28 years old
Has some remote communication experience(s): Either currently have close friends or family members living abroad/ participant currently lives abroad.
Owns at least one digital device (Smartphone, Tablet or Computer).
Has experience(s) using Social Media and/or Communication Apps for minimum 1 year.
CONTEXT DEPENDENT INTERACTIONS
Users adjust their behaviours and expectations depending on the group or people they are reaching out to as well as the platform they use for communication. Two main categories of distinction is Friends vs. Family and Online vs. Face-to-face.
SEEKING EMOTIONAL SUPPORT
Among the three types of supports, emotional support is most desired when reaching out to remote friends and family. However, individual differences moderate interviewee’s definition of quality emotional support, but empathetic communication remains continues to be a dominating theme.
FUNCTIONS OF COMMUNICATION
Online communication has cultured app specific behaviours that are distinct from face-to-face interaction.. Some functions are specific to the app ecosystem and are reported to enhance the interviewee’s experience, while some components cause frustrations.
Key Insights
03/ Ideate
User Task Flow
Epic development
2. User Journey Flow
Translating user’s wants and needs into a digital solution. I first generated a list of features (‘Epics’) that would be ideal to my users, then distilling my selection into one epic. Finally I spliced the main epic into smaller tasks based on groupings of similar user stories.
Sketches
Prototypes
Greyscale prototypes were created for 2 rounds of usability testing. Users (10 participants) were given a scenario to complete several tasks (5 items) on the prototypes. Results inform the next iterations, documented here.
Final Prototype
After solidifying the final task flow followed the tasks of injecting colours and graphical components. Here is the Aster, the final prototype. Aster is the mobile app that helps young adults feels more supported by allowing them to share mood data between friends in a confidential and meaningful manner.
Features
humanized mood check-in facilitated by AI
colour-mapped mood data visualization
mental health signal that alerts your friends when you needed them
community mood tracking, user form their own mood circle
complete privacy control and customization
fun part here
04/ Visual Branding
05/ Marketing Site
A responsive website is created to convey the visual branding of Aster.
Laptop & Mobile Viewports
06/ Takeaways
Design Impact
Future thinking
Could Aster be expand to a wider demographic? How would interaction between family members look like when using our app? These are questions to be explored through future usability testing and would better inform the next stage of development of this project.
Aster hopes to contribute to the effort of normalizing conversations of mental health especially for overseas young adulthood who might felt alienated from being physically away from their loved ones. Through a new way of input and visualizing mood data, we hope the experience can help foster empathy and a positive feedback of social support amongst close friends.