Now that I had a better understanding of the problem space I was working in, it was time to capture some deeper insights through exploratory interviews. I created an interview script and established my participant criteria. I conducted 5 interviews over video calls, each taking roughly an hour. After organizing and analyzing my findings, I was left with 4 actionable insights:

If mental health apps are losing 90% of users in the first week, and most users are frustrated by a lack of personalization, then it seems like personalization was the key to retaining more users, and therefore achieving my goal of helping millennials build long-term mental health habits.

Based on insights from my interviews, I created primary and secondary user personas. At their core, Toby and Anna are similar, but they differ greatly in their approach to their mental health journey. Toby prefers his journey to be organic. It’s about feeling better in each moment, from day to day. On the other hand, Anna prefers a structured, analytical approach—leveraging stats and streaks to reinforce positive habits. Since 80% of interviewees had Toby’s approach, I made him my primary persona.

I wanted to gain more empathy for Toby, so I created an experience map to understand what he’s seeing, thinking, and feeling throughout his journey of finding the right mental health app. This process allowed me to identify opportunities to help ease Toby’s frustrations.

I began developing the brand by identifying adjectives that were consistent with the visual identity I envisioned—Light, airy, relaxed, fresh. Then I pieced together a moodboard that incorporated all of those characteristics. The moodboard itself was inspired by the Mediterranean and how life seems slower, less complicated, and more intentional in that region of the world.

Based on the moodboard above, I extracted over 100 colour swatches and narrowed the selection down to just a few shades of blue and some pink/peach accents. From there, I selected Quicksand to be my primary typeface because of its soft, round edges that felt welcoming and approachable. Inter, a typeface designed for enhanced screen readability was selected to be my supporting typeface used in body copy. The result was an identity that felt fresh, light, and approachable while remaining entirely accessible from a colour-contrast and typographic perspective.

While I'm extremely proud of myself for what I accomplished within 10 short weeks, I'm also critical of the product I've created. In general, users loved the idea of a customizable journaling app but I'm not sold on the way I approached the idea. My solution largely relies on the user's manual input to add, remove, or edit questions within the journal template. And even if users were able to do this easily in user testing, I'm not confident that real users would have the patience to do things manually.

With that being said, my next steps to improve Journey would be to ideate (sketch, wireframe, test, repeat) new ways to implement the customization features. Rather than having the user input questions manually, could they be given suggestions the same way that Spotify suggests songs for a playlist based on the songs that are already inside it? I'd love to explore emerging technologies and how they might make the process of customizing a journal quicker, easier, and more intuitive.

I used epics and user stories to explore potential features and functionalities that would relieve Toby's pain points or help him achieve his goals. Organizing everything with user stories has the added benefit of everything being prepped for agile development cycles if this project was to be funded and put into production.