Weeks 11+12: Launching loose leaf
The 2016 interns at Made by Many would like to present loose leaf, the mobile journaling app that helps users track and become more aware of their mental health. Our platform erases journal entries upon completion to encourage a safe space to pursue any and all thoughts. In addition, it extracts data from each entry before deletion and processes it using IBM Watson’s Tone Analyzer to create visualizations of thoughts and emotions.
How it all started
Coming to the close of the summer, it’s hard to believe that twelve weeks have gone by so fast. However, as we race to put the final touches on our mobile app, it’s extremely rewarding to look back at where we started. On our first day, we were given the challenge:
Create a product using artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve a mental health problem.
While we had some direction of how to start thinking about the challenge and recommended resources to start research with, we were off on our own to narrow down the space to find a problem we wanted to solve.
Research
Before we could even start thinking about what we wanted to build, we needed to have a full understanding of what exactly is mental health and how do people think about it. We spent the first week researching mental health to make sure we were all on the same page with a clear definition moving forward with the rest of the project. Next we spent time researching new mental health startups, looking for trends and gaps in technology.
Perhaps the most important step was doing user research by interviewing a bunch of people on their mental health. We talked to as many people as we could reach and fit in. Given our connections, they mostly ended up being in their late teens and twenties. After talking to them, we were able to reach several conclusions:
- Everyone in this age group deals with stress and anxiety.
- There is a stigma around mental health, particularly in this age group, that prevents people from wanting to talk about it.
- People were open to using technology as a way to help deal with and monitor stress and anxiety.
With these thoughts in mind, we narrowed down our mental health space to be stress and anxiety. They were the most prevalent mental health issues that came up in our interviews, and also the areas in which we thought we could have the most impact.
Once we decided to focus on stress and anxiety, we reached out to mental health professionals including researchers, psychologists, clinical psychiatrists, and therapists. We wanted to hear about their experience working with young people and how they tend to be affected by stress and anxiety. We also were curious to learn about what practices they recommend to treat anxiety and stress — perhaps we could find a way to incorporate artificial intelligence to help with this practice. Interestingly, one of the highly recommended forms of therapy was journaling. This seemed like an interesting possibility, as we could do a lot of cool things with natural language processing through journaling. However, we still tested out a bunch of other ideas first to ensure that we were 100% confident with the idea we were going to build.
Low-fidelity prototyping
Once we narrowed down our target user to young people and the intended area of mental health to stress and anxiety, it was time to start thinking about some ideas of what to build. We had sketch sessions that involved the entire office where we all drew out ideas and built off of each other. We ended up creating low-fidelity paper prototypes for six ideas that we would show to users to get feedback.
Rapid prototyping and user testing
We unanimously voted in favor of developing an idea that came up in one of our sketch sessions — a journal in which all of your entries disappear upon completion. As we continued making prototypes, this time higher fidelity using Sketch and InVision, we kept getting feedback from users. The middle of our internship consisted of rapid prototyping: we would build a prototype, then test it out with users, then synthesize their feedback and start the process over again. This was an integral part of the process, as we were able to verify that our product would be usable and enjoyable for our users.
Our users were excited about the idea of a new journaling interface that they wouldn’t have to worry about people reading. An entry that deletes itself is great because users can write out their thoughts and emotions — a therapeutic exercise in itself — and then let go of the words to start on a clean slate. They also liked that the app would track the important elements of their journal for them so that they could better manage their mental health.
Designing and building
The final few weeks of our internship were some of the most exciting: we finally knew what we wanted to build and now just had to build it. Designs started coming together and we had a coherent theme throughout the app.
We chose the name loose leaf because it embodies our app on several levels. Primarily, a loose leaf sheet of paper is used for writing. But also the idea of a single piece of paper appealed to us — entries in this journal weren’t bound together. Each entry starts on a clean slate, with all previous entries erased.
Final thoughts
Thanks to everyone at Made by Many for such an amazing summer. We definitely learned a lot and are grateful to have been a part of such an awesome project.
We are launching the loose leaf beta within the next few days and are very excited to share it with you. Please visit our page to sign up for the beta release!
