NOTE: The case study of this project is still under-construction, so it’s missing some content, although there are enough information to understand the design thinking process and the outcome of the project. Thank you for your consideration

Project Description

EMO was a personal project as a result of participating in to the 5 weeks #COVID19CHALLENGE that UXER School and TeamLabs organized due to the Covid-19 situation, with aim to help the population overcome the side effects of the pandemic with new ideas.

The lockdown, the mourning, family loss and the economic crisis are causing people to have deep emotional turmoil. Uncertainty, anxiety, and fear become a part of our new reality. If it so, how might we endure and accept this new reality?

The lack of emotional management tools that has come up in this pandemic situation is one of the problems that we have to solve. It can be said that Personal Growth is key to managing the day-to-day situations even if we are in a time of crisis.

Work Areas

Competitive Analysis

User Analysis

Wireframing / Prototyping

Information Architecture

Visual Design

Interaction Design

What is EMO?

EMO is a mobile app which brings psychologists and personal growth experts in contact with users who have the need to improve their personal growth and learn how to manage their emotions.

The main goal of EMO is to personalize the emotional management learning process those who are seeking to strengthen this skills and achieve wellness in their lives. Furthermore, EMO wants to aid the experts to get more clients and to build synergies with different professionals on the platform with aim to share their concerns and send their clients to these professionals if the expert feels that their clients can get better information from them.

Research

The first step was to understand the situation and make some hypotheses and assumptions focused on determining if getting emotional management skills are something valuable for people lives and if people consider it an important need during the pandemic.

Surveys and interviews were conducted. 157 people answered and 25 people were interviewed.
The insights obtained were:

It is important to have a network of support and social relationships.
Most people manage the current uncertainty increasing their activity levels.
Frequent emotional roller coaster has been the normal state of people during the lock down.
Time management is a need which brings peace.
Most of the interviewees have emotional management awareness.
Need to prioritize finding time for introspection and self-reflection.

From the interviews and surveys, two types of users were found who have common concerns that depend on one another.

1. Therapists, psychologists, and emotional management experts who share the same interests in their economic environment.

2. Users who need therapy

Both profiles were defined in a User Persona, and further evolved using an Empathy Map.

After defining the user personas and understanding their needs better (seeking therapeutic support, investing time in self-care, escaping from reality and disconnecting, managing the positive emotions to find the balance), the next step was to find insights to decide which product to design to fulfill these user needs.

¿Which services are useful and accessible for the users during the lock down and after things return to normal?

¿Which service offers more facilities for the professionals in the performance of their business post-pandemic?

The information was organized and categorized with aim to define a specific goal through HMW (How Might We… ?) approach.

Some previous insights:

Is it possible to carry out a personalized self-regulated emotional management process using technology?
Why are there people who don’t use these kinds of emotional management services and resources, if they are aware they aren’t achieving their inner peace?
How would it be possible to bring closer and make people more aware about the value of emotional management in live?

After all the above insights the WMH was gotten:

How might we accompany the uncertainty management to achieve the emotional wellness for those persons who are seeking inner peace?

Brainstorming

The brainstorming was conducted in 3 steps.

1. Crazy 8’s to generate and conceptualize ideas

2. Classification and voting (dotmocracy) of the more valuable ideas

3. New design concept summarizing all the voted ideas

As a result of the process the outcome was to design a Web App.

Idea Canvas & Business Model Canvas

An Idea Canvas and a Business Model Canvas were made to assess the project viability

Value Preposition Canvas

Once the business model was defined, it was time to define the features of our product for each kind of user persona. Value proposition canvas was used to focus more on the business direction. Filtering and ranking of gains and pains were used to define which services are giving value to the product.

The product value proposition for each user persona was clear:

1. The web app helps users who want to manage their emotions to increase their feeling of well-being, peace and security.

2. The web app help professionals who want to make themselves known and enlarge their market with goal to get more clients.

Prototyping

Prior to sketching, Crazy 8’s was used again to determine the User Flows for each user persona.

Post-it notes were used to write down every action that user personas are going to follow.

It was necessary to check if all user personas can fit into one storyboard, or if two storyboards were needed, one for each user persona.

Low-Fidelity Prototype

A low fidelity prototype was designed to cover the main features and flows that were determined in the above steps and to do the first user tests to validate the idea.

High-Fidelity Prototype

After iterating the low-fidelity prototype (and glancing at examples on the Web for inspiration), the high-fidelity prototype was designed, and a final user test was made to validate the whole idea. From this test, the following concerns were rised:

Need for a Data protection policy
There is a risk that users can schedule sessions outside of the platform.
It can be a hurdle for people who are not accustomed to use technology.
Need for feedback transparency management.
Tariff unification

Conclusions

The MVP was created to present the idea to the #covid19challange, so the project is in its early stages. Nonetheless, we decided to continue working on it, making more iterations with aim to guarantee a good user experience and make it alive.