ITERATION 2: ANIMATED PROTOTYPE
BASIC FUNCTIONALITY AND ESSENTIAL BRAND COMPONENTS
Conceptual approach:
Given the high cost and limited availability of mental health practitioners, young people with neurodiversity and mood challenges need improved ways to engage with therapeutic tools.
Heal empowers neurodiverse young adults by providing an accessible, encouraging, and playful digital space to track their moods, connect with mindfulness practices and journal through their emotions.
The notion of a safe space and Heal’s branding is lifted from EMDR therapy, where patients are encouraged to visualise an emotional sanctuary that generates feelings of calm and safety to anchor them.
While the focus is on mental wellbeing and mood tracking, Feel is inspired by the interfaces and interactions of meditation apps, which tend to reflect their content and intent in terms of being supportive, calming and allowing a lot of options for the user.
However, while meditation apps are usually more neutral, I wanted to focus on warm colours to uplift the user, use natural imagery to reduce stress and conceptualise growth and change, and incorporate drawn elements + gentle animations to enable the app to feel less clinical and more personal, with emphasis on clear visual feedback in interactions and illustrated elements to reward completing activities.
I selected a complementary colour palette using warm purple, orange and white to evoke a sunrise/sunset atmosphere, using a gradient of these for most backgrounds, and navigation designed accordingly - with users guided to orange buttons to lead them forward through screens while navigating backward is consistently achieved through purple buttons.
Ensuring accessibility and ease of use as highlighted in user testing, key buttons and functions are within the thumb zone, with high contrast, skeuomorphic button style and increased text and button size.
In progress
ITERATION 3: HIGH-FIDELITY ANIMATED SEQUENCES
Prototype demonstrating loading screens, onboarding, home, mood check-in, journalling function, breathing exercise, personal data analytics, search functions, course content portal, active problem-solving, social sharing function for accountability and commitment, and immersive sensory experiences of progressive relaxation and cold therapy.