Calm the monkey
This is the plot of how i came to the idea of making an App to help people to calm the chattering mind.
I have being observing my friends and myself while being nervous, sometimes we are having recurrent thoughts that we try to scape to be able to go on, the problem is that they never go away!
On the first stages i was making some field work making interviews to several subjects about how they feel and what they do when they are being unquiet. This interviews were transcript and i made some drawings about them for trying to illustrate the whole process. I refused to make photos because i thing they are very intimate moments and they need to be respected.
It came up that many of us, while trying to get away of this thoughts we were getting more tired of frustrated and that had always put us in a more nervous mood.
Reading a lot of psychology i found that in the same way that the meditation does, the most important thing to do to calm your chattering mind is indeed not get away of your own thoughts but to listen them. It was recommended by this specialist to write down your thought and keep a log of them. Taking this idea as start point i developed Calm the monkey App concept.
Calm the monkey ask you to set an approximate time of the day in which you will like to have your sessions, but will never annoy you if you are using the mobile for other things like to send sms or talk. It waits till the mobile is in an pause period to remind you that its monkey time.
This has being an iterative process in which i start with the paper prototypes , going trough various stages and designs after making heuristic evaluation and some crowd testing.
Something really funny and unexpected is that when the testers acceded my prototype online, they couldn't understand the first screen that Marvel App show to them, everyone was clicking in the monkey thinking that was the way to install the prototype and that fill out them with frustrations.
So when it came to make monkey time they really needed it.
Another very choking experience was the first test with the UserTesting platform. Being a platform for testing usability the way of setting the test steps and the documentation is incredibly dry. Once i saw the videos of the tester using the App i realise it all and i was marveled ;-F !
Please check the video for more explanations.
And do not forget to check the prototype and tell me what do you think: