Week 10: Adjustments & Analytics

It’s hard to believe ten weeks have already gone by. However, when looking back on the past few weeks it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. Designs are almost done and development is coming along smoothly.

We may have been a bit ambitious last week in what we would be able to accomplish in five days. After adding some cool new features to the journaling part of our app, we were set back a day or two. In order to adjust to that, we reprioritized what exactly to design and build for the analysis section.

We spent some time this week looking closely at the designs for our two analysis features:

1. A word cloud that displays the five most used words in the user’s journal entries, each in a “bubble” whose size corresponds to the frequency of the word’s use.
2. A mood map that graphs IBM Watson’s five tones: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and joy. This data visualization underwent the most change this week. Sherry designed some awesome possibilities on Sketch that show the change in each emotion over the course of a week, month, or year.

The five emotions as depicted by Pixar’s Inside Out.

On the development front, Debbie is making great progress. Our journaling section is now done, as is the word cloud analysis feature. We’re excited about the progress that’s been made and can’t wait to start putting all the separate pieces together.

Another exciting part of this week was starting to think about names. HJ and I sat down and did a few brainstorming exercises to help with the creative process. HJ introduced two methods of brainstorming for a name that were really helpful:

1. Name as a metaphor: this involved talking out everything that the app does. What does it do, why does it do that, why is it important? Extracting the key words from this, we brainstormed words associated with each. For example, the app is intended to change your perspective on mental health. Some words we associated with perspective were: glasses, lenses, birds eye view, magnifying glass, zoom in, zoom out, angle, microscope, etc.
2. Name as a story: for this exercise we said out loud the story of how the app came about from the very beginning. We also talked about each decision that was made along the way and why we made that decision. We focused on some of the users that had a big impact on our project and doctors that advised us along the way.

Aftermath of a naming brainstorm.