By supporting students in managing their stress effectively without significant disruption to their busy schedules. Users are going to build their own peaceful island by completing daily challenges.
Skills: App design, Persona study, User Research
Tools: Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator
Platform: iOS
Final Video
Mid-Fi Wireframes
Problem: Our target audience, aged 18-27, faces significant time constraints and struggles with motivation to adopt healthy stress management habits. These college students possess the potential to experience distress but lack effective strategies for timely stress reduction.
Background
Background
Target Audience Interview
Most frequent concepts that our audience chose
Mid-Fi Wireframes
Brainstorming Ideas
The player plants a seed for a habit they wish to grow. As they log in their habits the plant grows and grows more each day.
A building island game, users can build their own island to release stress.
We came up with many ideas of what kind of products we will make including games, apps, and sensors. Our group went over every idea and voted. The left two ideas won. And our initial plan for the game is combining them.
User Flow
Mid-Fi Wireframes
Paper Prototype
User Feedback
Pretty overwhelmed after doing the to-do list
It is not clear that how opening the window affects the island.
The storytelling is attractive.
Create a friend on the island
Choose friend’s different personality types relates to different daily challenges
If player chose “Relaxed”, the daily challenge will be the easiest one such as opening the window in real life.
They get points for shopping and decoration.
After buying, it will lead them to decorate their own island.
Confused about whether it is a pet rising app or building island app.
Mid-Fi Wireframes
Persuasive Techniques
Mid-Fi Wireframes
01
Priming
Calming visuals to evoke relaxation and incorporate beneficial activities to prime positive emotions and healthy physical actions.
Enhance attachment to the game through cute character designs and compelling stories, making players more likely to complete challenges.
03
Reciprocity
Reward players with Stardust for completing tasks, which can be used to purchase items for island building, encouraging continued engagement through a give-and-take dynamic.
04
Intermix
Blend mental well-being challenges with unrelated fun activities to maintain interest and reduce predictability.
Consistency
05
After players build their islands by completing daily challenges, we use their investment in the game to foster consistent participation.
Overall, the play-testers had a lot of fun playing our game and they felt relaxing from the stress. Our goal was achieved. However, we still wanted to make more improvements with our design by adding in multiple persuasive design techniques in the game.
We noticed that the petting part was the most confusing one so we cut it and make the storytelling in the tutorial more complete to let players get the sense.
Mid-Fi Wireframes
Final Showcase
We invited many guests to play our game at the showcase day hosted in CMU HCI - Persuasive Design class. Our team prepared a poster for the guests to have a sense of what our game is about, then, we invited them to start to play. Most of them seemed really liked our game because of the intermixing of our relaxing 2D art style and the story-telling in the tutorial.
And our goal has been achieved by releasing people's stress since some people told us they were felling overwhelmed after walking in the classroom because there are so many spots for our classmates to showcase their products. But they felt released after playing our game.
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