serene.

wireframe prototype.

Part I: Creating a Wireframe Prototype

After receiving helpful initial design feedback, we continued on to create a monochrome wireframe prototype that was complete enough to "run” a new user through a particular use scenario of our system. Using Balsamiq we demonstrated the overall interaction flow of our system. We illustrated all the risky interactions of our system, and created the screens necessary for a user to go through the systems main use scenarios.


Here is a video of our initial wireframe prototype in use:

Here is the design rationale for this prototype based on our initial feedback:

“One direction we took in our updated design is to offer distinct emotions through icons, but also give the user a scale to access an overall emotion. Feedback from our previous design sketches indicated that because people feel so many emotions at once and different extents of those emotions, it makes sense to have each emotion on a scale. We also planned to have the activities pages offer items specifically in response to the moods that the user tracks during that day (or the most recent moods logged).

Part II: Specific Changes Made for the Wireframe Prototype

Home page: For our home page design, we wanted to keep many of the aspects present on the homepage from our initial sketched Design1. For example, we kept the date at the top of the homepage as well as the streaks message. The streaks message can encourage the user to continue using the app and logging moods, as well as give them a sense of achievement as the numbers get higher and higher. It also provides a gamification aspect to the app which we hope will be fun. We also kept the calendar format of allowing the user to click on past dates to see their log history, however, we added a label instructing users to do so in case the calendar itself is not strong enough as a signifier. We did not include the “Trending TED Talk” portion of Design 1’s homepage because we wanted the interface to be a little less crowded and overwhelming, but we kept the box beneath and had it feature inspirational quotes. The new design’s homepage also had a larger logging button as a better signifier of the app’s main purpose as well as more obvious icons. In our updated design, we also kept the personalized greeting featured on the homepage of Design 2 because it helps the user feel more seen and acknowledged by the app and creates a rapport.


Log Page: Our log page kept the emoji emotion indicators that were present in Designs 2, but it models after the very clean and open format of Design 1’s log page. We also added an “Overall Mood” slider in case the user feels that being able to quantify their emotions makes more sense in their mind or if they want multiple POV’s of their emotions. We kept the “Notes” box from Design 1 for the user to add any thoughts related to their emotions of the day. Instead, of the question directly asking user’s why they feel the logged emotions from Design 2, we simply asked users to write a point of gratitude because it evokes less pressure and a little less thinking in the case where users do not want to spend a lot of time on the app or if they are not in a mental space to reflect on a given mood.


Activities Page: Our updated activities page combined elements of Design 1 and Design 2. As indicated above, the recommended activities would now be directly related to the mood that is logged. The page changed to “Choose an activity” at the top and featured the “skip for now” button at the bottom from Design 1 to give users freedom, but the activities were represented with icons and labels as in Design 3.


User Summary: For our user summary page, we wanted to keep the scrolling feature from Design 3 since it makes it easy to see their popular activities that do not fit on one page. The activities the user goes to most would be ranked in a list on this page as in Design 1. The user’s name was included at the top as in Design 1 as well as a donut pie chart, indicating the prevalence of different moods.


Mood History (when user clicks a date in calendar on the homepage): The mood history page would open to a summary in the center, but a scrollable page similar to the History page of Design 2 was included so that users could go between nearby dates or hit a back arrow key to return to the calendar and select a different date. We also performed additional user testing and had users from our target population record themselves performing tasks with our monochrome wireframe prototype to gain additional feedback for our next design iteration.