Case Study

The project started as a Mindmap for things that are unfair

After submitting the Mindmap and thinking of my initial ideas. I liked the idea of a notes app, but the one in the Mindmap for mental health wasn't specific enough to make something meaningful.

That's when I came up with a "notes" app to help people with OCD. This can help relax that some of that self doubt. This is based off the idea that taking a photo of something someone might check (like the stove) can be helpful.

Another problem and something this app can help with, is how someone who might be doing this, will eventually have a ton of saved photos on their phone of things they were anxious about in the past. This can add on to OCD by not wanting to remove the photos, and even being anxious to open your photos app.

This app is designed to keep all OCD thoughts contained while also preventing the app becoming a compulsions itself.

It almost feels like there is an infinite amount of different note taking apps. I have done a ton of research over the years about the different notes apps and even Personal Knowledge Management apps that already exist. None of these would really be suitable for OCD since they just accumulate data great and don't have any features that would help people specifically with OCD and only have features that could make it worst. A lot of people with OCD feel embarrassed or even guilty about their OCD, so something that just accumulates data and is in the cloud is a no go and most of these apps are cloud based.

One big feature that doesn't exist in a lot of these apps are timer based locks, and auto deletion. These are important so that way a user can get better control on their compulsions of checking, and adding notes to the app. ( The app is designed to be used less and less ) This is called Exposure and Response Prevention.

After taking on the project of designing a notes app specifically for OCD, I had a look if there were any that already existed. I could only find 4 that specialized in OCD. Sadly one of these apps were removed from the Google Play Store and wasn't available on iOS (This one was a local option but didn't have an option to add images). The rest were very much so cloud based. So there wasn't something available that was as specialized as my app idea.

Different versions of the App

Color
At first when I did the visual design of the app, I tried not using a monochromatic color palette. But I soon found out that for a notes app that's specialized in OCD, that was very difficult. Most of my peer reviews were mentioning the color palette, so at the last minute I redid the color palette, which is a lot more monochromatic then originally planned.
Since I wanted the app to be as stress-free as possible I was extremely limited.
color pal

Placement of Elements
For the placement of elements, I wanted it to be as simple and easy, and fast as possible to add an idea. I didn't get much feedback about the placement. Just to make sure the pen in the bottom right is clearly a button to press.

Task One:
In the app, a user is able to add "thoughts" which are a "note" either as text or an image. I made sure in the app to call these "notes" "thoughts" since they aren't notes.

Task Two:
A user can also change the settings inside the "hamburger" menu. The settings is where all the locks, auto deletion, and limits live. Right now in the prototype there are 3 settings.

Task Three:
A user can also view and delete past "thoughts". The viewer is pretty simple, but also shows a clear time and date from when the "thought" was added

Task Four:
A user can reset the app from the settings menu

The first thing I noticed after doing usability tests is that I should make the prototype in Figma a lot more clearer. How I did this was after a user completed some tasks, I had the app automatically reset back to the start. This helped clear up a lot of the confusion. But besides that, the test went smoothly and the design was very clear and simple for users to understand and use.

One thing I would do differently, would be to add some more features. A "scoreboard" or stats page to show a users progress is something I wanted to add, but didn't have the time to add that. There's more things I wanted to add but that is one of the biggest.

What I learned by working on this project was how powerful prototyping is. I feel like if I were to actually program the app to actually function, it would be significantly easier since I have this working prototype!

I'm most proud of having a working prototype that also has some animations to it. But I'm also proud of the color palette, I think it turned out amazing even after being so unsure I was going to be capable of coming up with one that was good. But overall I'm very happy with this prototype.

I found working with Figma at first to be the most challenging but also the most rewarding, there's a lot to it. Like I didn't know that Figma saved versions of your designs and thought I didn't have any progress that I made for adding screen shots to this Case Study. But I was wrong and was able to find that Figma does save your progress! ( That's where the screenshots on the "App Design" part are from! )