More than 1 in 5 US adults live with a mental illness. As a strong advocate for mental health support, I acknowledge how difficult it is to manage one's emotions and improve upon mental health habits such as mindfulness.
How can we encourage a diverse group of users to improve upon mental health habits?
I not only wanted to help tackle the mental health epidemic by building an app but also, take it another step further to add features to make it accessible to as many people as possible.
Emotion diary would be a platform where users can create emotional events which has a variety of data such as the emotion, object, and cause. All of these events are displayed in a calendar and by recording these events, users can get a better idea of their emotional lives and take actions to improve it.
I illustrated 28 emojis for a user to relate to that would be used throughout the app. As part of my accessibility initiative, I checked the color contrast ratio of each emoji color with black + white text to make sure it passed the AAA level WGAC standards.
Similar to journaling, users can add different aspects to each emotional event in their calendar. This allows for more self-awareness and mindfulness about what happened. Tracking emotions in a calendar also allows users to look back to self-reflect or observe any patterns.
Aging users or those with vision impairments now have the ability to change all of the text size in the app to a more readable size.
Some visual impairments can make it difficult to look at or process bright colors and those with dyslexia or other visual processing disorders may find it tough to interpret black text on a white background. A dark mode option allows comfort in navigating the app to a wider range of users.
Mobile increases accessibility to users who rely on touch or users who do not have web devices.
I also added a speech to text feature and once again, integrated the customization features that exist on web.
At a glance, a user cannot see their full entry of an emotional event in the calendar. I utilized the sidebar real estate to give the user quick & easy access and to prevent taking them off their workflow.
A summarized modal of all emotional events in that day will show when event appearance is maxed out (in this case, more than 2).
Collaborating within a very small team (aka a duo) is both challenging but, rewarding. I can have creative freedom while working closely with a reliable developer, being fortunate that I can focus on my designs and see them come to life. Though, only working as a duo has its limitations which is why certain ideas take longer to flesh out.
Designing for both mental and physical struggles are not always the easiest but, incredibly important to me because they are areas undermined in the world.
Emotion Diary is still continuously being improved upon by me and the developer over time. I hope to keep adding to this page as we add more features! (One of the most recent new additions is detecting if a user is suicidal based on their inputs and giving them resources).
