This project began in the concept phase and had a very limited mobile app that allowed users to simply login and sign up with the coach. There was no interactive features and was a dead end user story. The concept was to have a highly interactive platform with capabilities for gamification and communication between coach and mentor. Also the app itself would provide links to external resources and track user input moods. Firstly the brand guidelines were delivered and as part of the research process I did some comparative searches between similar mental health apps such as headspace and other life coaching apps. While developing the UI I was challenged by at this stage with the amount of colour and patterns used in the design brief. I was sort of hoping there would be more flexibility in narrowing down the patterns to to 2 or 3 and the colours to 3 - 5. It felt like there was a lot going on visually in an app that also had a fair amount of interactive features and I didn't want it to be too overwhelming for the user. The incentive was to make it easy to set up goals and therefore achieve real world results. I ended up using a few repeating patterns and opting for the three main colours with graphics that incorporated the secondary ones. Here are my research process presentation slides.
Some prototypes for the onboarding pages are below. I managed to deliver the MVP by the deadline for THM to use in their investing pitch to the Ministry of Social Development. The gamification element was definitely interesting to develop and I would have preferred to have more time to implement that feature further. I also really loved the cultural element to this app and being able to research native stories to put the user first.
The first iteration of the home screen pictured below was developed to show investors the full scope of features to be implemented. Further development would be to condense those features down to action buttons
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