App Design
Moodr App
Science backed mood based task manager & awareness tool
Overview
Designing a product to help with stress management for employees and managers based in psychological theories.
Approach
Primary and secondary research, user research, interviews, user testing, low and high fidelity prototypes
Timeline
January - June 2024
Group project done in collaboration with one Well-being psychologist, two designers and a computer scientist.
As a group of students, we were tasked to create a solution within the worksphere, specificalling focusing on the stress management aspect of work.
Research phase
Desk Research
Each of the student started with their own desk research on stress management at the workplace, we used Miro to collaborate and share out our research with eachother.
Areas of concern
Lack of satisfaction due to mismatch between engagement style and performed activity
Mental health affected by leadership/hierarchy
Increase of stress due to lack of autonomy at work
Current Market
Looking at what’s already out there, I was able to identify patterns within other platforms and services, as well as their flow and usability.
Wellbeing and mood
tracking apps
Calm - Headspace - Relax VR - etc.
Project/task management softwares
Jira - Asana - Trello - etc.
Remote/in-person therapy solutions
Serenis - Talkspace - BetterHelp - etc.
User Research
After our desk reserach, we still had open questions that we wanted to answer, so we drafted an interview questionnaire to asnwer the following questions:
How people experience stress at work?
The origins of stress: Work or life related?
Are people interested in implementing stress management strategies provided by their companies?
How people manage work-life balance?
What affects stress the most?
We were able to recruit 11 people working in mid to large corporations, in hybrid settings. They were based in Italy and the United States, and work in the sales, engineering, and communication fields.
Target Personas
In-person interviews and casual conversations allowed me to gather insights, define and establish our target audicences to better serve them in the development of our platform.
Key needs of Beatrice
Satisfying her boss but be autonomous
Positive relationships with coworkers
Key painpoints of Beatrice
Lack of communication
Overworking until exhaustion
“I take on extra work to impress my leaders and because they can trust me to handle it”
User Journeys
Hearing our users' stories and frustrations, I was able to draft out their journey and opportunities for us to involve in the website, and features to include.
As-is user journey for Beatrice
Friction points in the as - is journey
Taking on too much work in order to prove her manager she can do it
Unable to communicate the fact that she’s overwhelmed
Growing resentment due to lack of transparency
To be user journey for Beatrice
Fixed points in the imagined journey
Public mood sharing for teams
Rearrangement of tasks of the day based on current mood
Opportunity to communicate with manager about workload
What did we learn from our research
Compiling together the desk research, we put together a summary of what we learned:
Reasons of stress in the workplace
Levels of autonomy
People’s individual engagement styles didn’t fit their tasks
Managerial reasons
Stress relief efforts
Current stress relief programs are underutilized
Everyone uses a different coping mechanism
Positive findings
Open communication and positive relationships at work correlated to lower stress levels
Being aware of one’s emotions helps them increase resilience and empathy
Share awareness of emotions and skills among employees and encourage workloads to be shared more fairly and efficiently?
How might we…
Our Solution Concept Features
Mood tracking and sharing awareness among employees
Task reorganization based on mood and engagement archetypes
Seamless communication with manager about current mood
Wireframing & defining user flow
The first feature is supposed to be the first step in the user flow, as the user logs in their mood in order to start their workday. So I wanted to define the most user friendly and ergonomic method of entering mood at the workplace.
Inputing mood screen
I created three different variations of visualizations for desktop and created a quick user flow for how the mood inputing process should work.
Inputing mood user flow
With one of the styles, I wanted to define how user would be navigated through inputting their mood. After the three iterations, we decided that it is easier to replicate a pattern that users are already used to, so we moved forward with implementing iPhone mood tracker pattern.
Mobile MVP design
After this iteration, we decided to continue with mobile designs, so understand better how we would use the smaller landscape we have on mobile.
The flow above is the minimum viable product, where the user selects their current mood and the task list automatically updates based on task difficulty and the required mood for respective task.
Key Features in Moodr
2 part mood description based in valence and arousal
It is hard to define and describe how you feel at the moment. Because of this, we wanted to divide the emotion selection process into 2 parts and have visual guides associated with it:
Valence: Determining the positive or negative emotions: Unpleasant - Pleasant
Arousal: Determining the activity level: Low arousal (Lethargic) - High Arousal (Invigorated)
Sharing awareness among employees and manager
We know it is hard to share our mood in a professional setting.
However, it is a crucial part of being a team and working together. When colleagues are aware of each other's mood, they can better support each other during the work day and will need to read less between the lines.
Same applies to your communication with your manager, if we establish a healthy level of transparency through indirect communication, we allow managers to have a better overview of their team and their daily state, and possible next steps.
Team Mood
Your team is very important for collaboration and efficiency.
Often we overlook how important it is to be in a supportive team in which you feel comfortable enough to share your feelings. In corporate world we organize so many get together's to create a bond within the team, but we forget the emotional connection.
This is why Moodr enables your team to share your personal mood during the day and includes smart suggestions as actionable items. The same view is shown also in the manager view with the personal notes you can share with your manager.
Task Reorganization
Many of us struggle with organizing our task list. We could order them by priority or due date, but often this is not enough for our cognitive system.
Moodr uses the engagement style theory from psychology to understand which task would be better suited for your current mood;
Feeling down? You will be better at working tasks that require detail.
Feeling excited? You will be better at collaboration and creativity.
Moodr also allows you to accept and change the suggested tasks, learning from your habits and preferences.
Manager View
Seamless connection between the employee mood input and the commentary between the manager view.
I'm currently updating this project, check back soon :)