Emotewell

Background

Team Acknowledgements

This project was completed for Emotewell on behalf of Invention Corps of Berkeley. I’d like to thank the members of this project for their valuable contributions: Arpna Ghanshani, Aditya Vunnum, Kayla Reid, Dustin Buyck, and Kimberly Thai.

Our Client

Emotewell is a digital wellness startup that uses personalized and scientifically-backed journaling prompts to empower emotional health. They intend to expand their services to a mobile application, and approached Invention Corps for help on designing their onboarding process and introducing a gamification aspect.

Our project was guided by the following question:

How might we create a delightful, rewarding, and positive experience to provide users immediate value and keep them coming back to Emotwell?

Understanding Our Users

Methods

User Interviews

We conducted 14 interviews with students and young working professionals, Emotewell’s target demographic. We asked users about their emotional wellness habits, use of digital wellness services, gaming habits, and motivators for using journaling or digital wellness products.

Competitive Analysis

We analyzed 10 competing digital wellness apps. We took note of the type of services provided, the onboarding experience, positive user experiences, and negative user experiences.

Analogous Game Research

We researched popular and engaging games that we identified through user interviews. We analyzed 9 different games, paying attention to the gameplay and engagement incentives.

Usability Observation

We conducted a usability observation with 20participants who had never used Emotewell before. We presented users with Emotewell’s current interface and asked participants to go through a key task, while thinking out loud and expressing all opinions.

Extracting Key Insights

Affinity Mapping

After multiple rounds of research, we consolidated all insights through affinity mapping.

Our users need

Customization, personalization, and flexibility for digital journaling.

A positive motivator to help them stay on track with their emotional wellness goals.

User Personas

From our user interviews, we found various unique reasons and habits for journaling. As a result, we created different user personas to develop a deeper understanding of how to address such a broad range of needs.

Ideation

Convergent & Divergent Ideation

Concept Validation

The concepts we ended up choosing where:

quick journalling before signing up
mindful reflection activities when you log on to the app
a currency system to encourage frequent journaling
random rewards to facilitate a sense of affirmation
achievements to foster motivation
stickers as a rewarding experience to be used in future journals

We engaged in multiple rounds of prototyping, constantly incorporating new feedback from our client for new iterations.

The Final Product

Onboarding: Try It For Yourself

From our user research, we found that users who are interested in trying new digital wellness services, are turned away from the product if they have to go through an excessively long and tedious onboarding process.

We reimagined Emotewell’s onboarding process to bring immediate satisfaction to prospective users.

At the start of the onboarding process, we introduce a brief reflection activity to offer our users a quick pause & center wellness.

We included a “quick journal” option, allowing users to try out Emotewell’s service before they go through the tedious process of signing up for an account.

Our reimagined onboarding process allows users to observe the value of Emotewell’s service immediately.

CloudCoins: Journaling as a Rewarding Experience

We wanted to include a gamification aspect in the app as a way to create a delightful and rewarding atmosphere, encouraging people to come back to Emotewell’s service.

From our research, we found that users enjoy games that have avatars and achievements systems. The ability to “unlock” certain aspects of the game with currency attained from gameplay makes users want to keep playing.

As a result, we introduced a rewards system to serve as motivation for users to continue journaling for emotional wellness.

Whe users complete a journal, they are awarded “Cloud Coins”, which can be used to purchase stickers.

The stickers can be used in future journals, offering a positive and cute atmosphere to the user in their journey for emotional wellness.

We also introduced the concept of “achievements” that users can also earn Cloud Coins for. An example of an achievement is “Journal 3 days in a row”, with a corresponding Cloud Coins award.

Encouraging Mental Wellness