Relieve your stress and anxiety with Placid, the intelligent Chatbot game.
Project goal
Create an application that helps users manage stress and anxiety. The app will track the mental state of users, help them talk about it with their loved ones and also seek to improve their mental state before an anxiety crisis occurs.
*Please, be aware that all information in this case study is my team’s: Cesar García, Albert Carreras, Camila Rojas, Aarón Pou and me.
Following the Design Thinking process
We applied the Design Thinking (DT) methodology to empathise with potential users and offer them a simple and intuitive application to which they can resort at any time of stress and anxiety.
Design thinking board & initial sketches
Empathise
Conducting User Survey and interviews with psychologists
We conducted a user survey to gain user insight and gather ideas to reach the goal of the project.
We wrote a 13-question survey and shared it with contacts that matched the target user profile. We received 67 responses.
Additionally, we had 3 interviews with specialists in the field of psychology to look for functionalities that could be useful to the stressed and/or anxious user.
Benchmarking & online reviews
We also benchmarked +14 apps across different categories such as meditation, anxiety trackers, diaries, and apps that provide guidance to manage stress & chatbots. This allowed us to have an overview of the functionalities the market already offers and the feedback real users have.
Conclusions:
- The vast majority of apps are based on meditation, breathing control, and improving sleep quality as strategies to treat stress and anxiety (scientifically supported).
- The use of tools to assess and monitor anxiety and stress levels is common to quantify the evolution of the users' condition (and its effectiveness).
Define
User personas: pains & motivations
We created and validated three persona profiles by using the information obtained from the interviews with psychologists, the results obtained from the survey, and the benchmarking from competitors.
Problem definition "how might we..."
Creating the user personas helped us concretize and put together all research data obtained and this was a big step for us to define the problem that our target users were facing and we needed to solve with our app:
How might we design an app that helps anxious and/or stressed users relax while interacting with it, reduce their anxiety levels overtime and be understood by their loved ones?
Ideation
Features & functionalities to solve users' needs
Based on the research conclusions & user persona profiles, the team and I were able to come up with 3 features for the app after a fun & creative virtual brainstorming session.
AI Chatbot
It is a virtual assistant for primary psychological care that detects states of stress and anxiety. The user communicates with the assistant through text or voice messages and once it has sufficient information, it informs the user of his or her level of stress or anxiety. If necessary, the chatbot suggests a series of recommendations aimed at de-stressing the user. The recommended practices are supported by the practice of clinical psychology.
Share function
It allows the user to share their mood with their most intimate contacts in a semi-automatic way. This eliminates the friction that causes blockage in many stressful and anxious states when communicating their state. It also helps to make the user's inner circle aware of the user's situation and empathize with him or her. Additionally, it makes it easier to ask for professional assistance in the most acute cases.
Stress & anxiety history
Managing stress and anxiety requires time and perseverance. This feature helps to put into perspective the entire evolution of the user throughout the interaction with Placid.
Information Architecture (IA)
The Miro whiteboard platform made it very easy for us to work on our IA remotely and define how our users would interact with the 3 key features.
Information architecture of the app
Prototyping
The Virtual Assistant (VA)
One relevant output from our interviews with the phycologists was the aspect that our VA should have.
- Transition: In order to bring the user to a state of peace and relaxation, it needed to have soft movements and transitions.
- Shape: The shape should be rounded, as it tends to send a positive emotional message of harmony and protection.
- Colors: The colors should be pastel rather than bright. The blue and violet colors are often used to bring users to a relaxed and safe mental state, this is why we chose them as the primary colors for the app and for the calm state of the VA.
Transition design of the VA when interacting with it.
Design System
We applied the color palette established for the VA to the rest of the app for consistency and created the design system for the rest of the UI elements with Figma.
