chronic ‘what if’ syndrome

Earlier this year a friend introduced me to traditional Chinese medicine and qigong for an ongoing health issue. My understanding of the world slowly shifted as I came to understand and accept that the mind, body, and spirit must all be in balance in order to enjoy total health. I’ve struggled with negative thinking and anxiety since I was a teenager, and so this has been my biggest habit to overcome as part of the healing process. As a result, I’ve spent the past half year focusing on ways to bring peace and joy into my everyday life. I enrolled in Coursera’s Interaction Design Specialization capstone course in the midst of this, and so when we were tasked with creating an app that solved a problem, I wanted to build something that would help both myself as well as others dealing with anxiety.

But first I needed to see how other people surfaced and interacted with anxiety. I spoke with individuals getting ready for important events in their lives and observed how their true focus became misdirected and full of dread, mainly because of projected what ifs. An excited aunt who was getting ready to go to her nephew’s graduation, but running behind schedule. A teenage girl who wanted to go out on the town with her sister, but also had work she needed to get done to earn money to pay her tuition. The was aunt concerned that she might bump into an old classmate and needed to impress them with a new hairstyle. The teenager was concerned that people in public would think her arms were too hairy for a girl.

All of the things that caused their feelings of anxiety seemed so insignificant from an outsider’s perspective. All they truly wanted was to make it to their intended events and celebrate with the people that mattered most, but anxiety redirected that attention away. This revealed the insight that people need the opportunity to refocus their minds, to find their way back to what matters. Something easy and non-invasive that realigns their thinking and makes them feel positive about their day.

I remembered reading a Fast Company article a few months ago about what happened when humans viewed photographs of cute animals — they became more focused on the good of the “other” — anyone not themselves — and better able to meet the other’s needs. Merely looking at cute animals could make a person more likely to not only assist, but also be good at, helping others. Since anxiety is in part a false focusing inwards, seeing baby animal photos could help counteract that. Not to mention that merely seeing a cute animal makes you a happier more playful person overall. I began to think that perhaps my app could facilitate this rather simple but delightful activity. I began to storyboard how my app could fit into someone’s life.

This exercise made me realize that not everyone is as visual in nature and I wanted to create a more robust solution that accommodated individuals who identify as more auditory learners. At some point in your life you’ve likely read about how a person’s mood can be strongly influenced by the characteristics of the music he/she listens to. For instance, calm music with a slow, consistent rhythm assists in slowing and regulating the heartbeat of its listener. So I decided to pull this functionality into the app, of use to both auditory and visual learners as I realized from my next storyboard.

Though there are many competing apps already available that focus on meditation and mindfulness, many of them can come across as being a bit too New Age, or just require too much involvement from the part of the user. This means that many users try the apps and then drop off due to living busy lives (which ironically prompted them to seek out the app in the first place). In contrast, I planned to make the small, playful interventions of my app not require a commitment, and just feel like fun.

My app, or prototype at least, would allow an individual to 1) send themselves cute photos of animals (accompanied by inspiring Zen Buddhist sayings) and 2) to play uplifting mood-centric music. The app would begin by briefly taking the user on a journey to find out how they are feeling in the current moment, and then show the replacement of that emotion with a more positive one. Next the app would allow the user to choose two paths: auditory or visual. From this plan, I built out a very streamlined paper prototype that would (hopefully) be very simple to use, and tested it with some friends.

From observing these testers, it became clear that while they liked that they could set a timer for puppy push notifications, they also wanted to engage with the app in the present moment, viewing numerous photos and quotes. For instance, they might need a boost in the current moment while they have free time, but they’d also like to have the app send them these photos on a regular basis, say once an hour, so they can keep their spirits up while they’re on the go. As a result, this functionality became an essential part of the next phase: a digital prototype of the app.

I can’t overstate this enough: having strangers test the app on Usertesting.com was incredibly eye opening. It was amazing to hear the recordings of the respondents’ voices as they walked through the prototype. You could detect any strain and tension in their voices diminishing over the course of the review, some actually starting to use baby voices when they saw the photo of the puppy. This was proof already that the app was working! (Of course there were also some navigational hiccups at this point, so this allowed me to resolve them.)

At this stage, the app was not much more than a glorified wireframe, created in mint green to create a soothing but simple effect on the user. The feedback from users on this was that the white made them feel as though they were completing an exam. So in the final version of the app the background became a soothing, more polished blue. This became the final look and feel of the app.

Formally introducing the uplift app, helping you discover the joy of focus.

You can play with the full (invision) prototype here!

Bonus: Here’s a video I made to explain why you should use uplift.

Postscript — I hope you enjoyed reading about my journey as much as I enjoyed being on it. This was my first foray into complete end-to-end app design (minus programming) so I know it’s not without its imperfections, but the lessons I’ve learned along the way have been as valuable as gold and should serve me well going forward. Looking forward to the next challenge!