NYC Stress Relief App

I designed a stress relief game app that allowed users in New York to “spin” a roulette game once a day to recieve three suggestions for healthy activities influenced by their location. Once their activitiy is received, the app is then time-locked until the user returns in 24-hours for another daily spin. By limiting choice and “gamifying” acts of self-care, creativity, and socialization, users are encouraged to promote their own mental health though a progression system that emphasizes engaging with the real world instead, not the app itself.

UX Designer

1 Week

I was given one week to create a mobile app to help New Yorkers improve their health. Narrowing in on improving mental health, I created my designs after interviewing New Yorkers about their experience with stress and their actions to reduce it. In a weeks time, we were expected to have our design researched, documented, designed, tested, and ready to present in paper prototype form in a week’s time.

Initial Problem Statement

Initally, I was unsure of what to expect from a mental health app. My inital problem statement read:

My inital thoughts were to design an organizational calendar or an app to track fitness. However, my first step was to interview New Yorkers about their relationship to stress.

I conducted five interviews among young professionals in New York. In this interviews I asked them a series of questions about stress in their lives: What did stress-relief mean to them? What do you do to reduce stress? How often do you do those activites? What prevents you from pursuing these activites more often?

I used those ideas as a guide to have five conversations that led to some intersting insights.

Most users believed that stress-relief came from a balanced day. As long as their lifestyle included a variety of tasks and activites, any amount of stress would be more evenly distributed amoung them in their life, instead of becoming “stuck” in one part of their life be it family stress, work stress, or otherwise. While access was plenty in the city, users stated that there was never enough time to perform activites they wished to do.

User’s also stated that while they are like stress-relieving activites, they also crave activites with meaning i.e. creative, social, or otherwise self-improving activites. Users desired those things even if those activites themselves were stressful. One user felt like while mindless activites were benefical for her after a long day, she often felt like she was “wasting her life” when she spent too much time in them.

Users also stated a desire to form positive habits, but stated that a lack of engagement or excitement in those activites prevented habit formation.

Upon finishing user interviews, I had a stronger idea of how to proceed. I redefined my problem statement:

In designing the app, I realized I had to operate around a few limiations. While it was clear that all New Yorkers experienced stress, everybody had strong preferences about how they wished to solve it. This means the app needed to provide solid customization in how User’s enacted their preffered de-stressing activities.

Furthermore, there is a serious limitation to how an app can fix stress caused by immurable ingrained societal factors. As a result, I wished to narrow my focus on to a more modest, but effective level. It may not be possible to fix the difficulties of work-life, but I could provide better efficiency to the stress relief and fun found within the freetime New Yorkers find themselves with.

My idea was to make a game of it! I wanted to create a system with limited choices and timeframes to reduce any potential decision fatigue or stress from a perceived “poor choice” as well as to limit time user’s spent on the app instead of life activites. To encourage users to discover interesting new activites around them. The app needed to recommend local activites of varying difficulties/time investments, as so users of any level of free time could engage with the experience.

I would also need to create a reward system, however artificial, to encourage users to return to the app habitally. This limited time use of the app would also create an artifical sense of scarcity to how the app operated, encouraging users to come back the moment activites once again unlocked. The app also needed to be social and encourage users to play with their friends, or potentially with their yet-unknown to them fellow “Rouletters.”

Thus the design was based around these features. Once per day, the app allowed one “spin” to recieve three activites based on their location ranked by difficulty/time-investment and coded by one of four tags: Soothing, Creative, Engaging, and Social. These categories were created based on the four major types of stress-relieving activities I recorded in interviews. Once an activity was chosen, that tag would not be present the next day, as to subtly encourage users to vary up their chosen activies.

Once an activity was chosen, they would be assigned points based on difficulty and given the directions to the activity or to where it was located. Over time, as users would collect points, they would “level up” unlocking badges and other flair to add to their profile.

Users could spin solo or with others. In future itreations, I would like to explore more how “spinning with others” could be better utilized to help app users find new friends as much as it is used to participate with existing ones.

Usability testing involved two rounds of five users each. In these test, the users were presented with three scenarios and tasks as they mimed through three different days of “Breaktime Roulette” usage. One scenario involved choosing an activity with high amounts of time and high energy. The second included low aomunts of time and low energy. Finally, the final task involved choosing a high energy task while linking their app to do an activity with a friend.

Users were able to complete these tasks easily, the only large large mistake on the part of user being the difficulty in understanding where to click when desiring to “spin with friends” but in general users understood the system relatively quickly and easily. But people desired some changes:

People wanted more direction in how to proceed after reciving their task. This mean’t that more guidance and directions needed to be given after selecting their task. People also desired more game-like elements and reward systems.

These elements were implemented before the second round. The generic “points” was changed to a “level” system, and a badge system was added to give additonal positive feedback to leveling up.

In the second round of usability testing, a fourth task was added for the user to examine their profile, added after user’s requested for more reward systems. This second round has provided much more information I would like to use to continue to iterate on the app’s design.

Reflection

If I were to continue, I would love to continue to iterate and test the prototype. With more time, I would like to respond to feedback by fleshing out the social system, reworking the flow to reward users after completing the task, rather than before, and make more interface changes. Users also desired more progression systems and flair to increase user engagement. Potentially these progression options would allow users to add cosmestic changes to their profile when viewed by other “Rouletters.”

I would also like to add cases for extra spins to be again after completing seven days of (non-sequitentally required) spins. Also, the user should be able re-spin, potentially once a month, a selection of activites they strongly dislike.

This project helped me learn the value of iteration. Learning from user comments helped me iterate and redesign my project so much faster and more effectively than I could have done on my own.

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