Zeniversity
During my UX/UI design coursework at UC Berkeley, I had conducted user research to discover that many students did not prioritize mental wellbeing. From this finding, I designed an app with several features to combat this issue: How do students cope with stress and how could I help them manage it more effectively?
Self-Guided Meditation Tracks
Group Meditation Rooms
Professional Help
Smile Detection
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UX Research
Simultaneously working full-time and attending schooling full-time took a significant toll on my own personal mental health. Realizing this, I conducted interviews and diary studies on students to examine how others cope to balance their mental wellbeing. I created an affinity diagram to discover common threads.
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UI Design
Upon recognizing many students face cognitive overload and stressors from school, I was inspired to create a user interface that focused on white space and simple illustrations. I created a component library to ensure my design system was consistent throughout all screens. The style incorporated a card-like system.
“I had previously coped with school-induced stressed by snacking but this app helps me meditate both individually and with others.”
— UC Berkeley Student (User Test Subject)
Features
From UX research (need-finding) I aimed to incorporate several different aspects to tackle stress.
One method was through self-guided meditation tracks that users would be able to sele
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As some students prefer meditating alone or are simply uncomfortable doing so with others, this feature would allow those to listen to audio tracks to help address specific student-relevant topics such as anxiety, relationships, or even productivity.
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For those students who seek comfort in numbers, this feature allows students to share their experience and listen to others’. Users would be able to speak through their mobile device’s microphone and send messages to individual and all users in the room.
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For students who are seeking medical and professional help, they are able to filter and search through a list of filtered and or sorted providers.
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As a dark-horse idea, I thought it would be a unique feature to implement AI facial recognition. This feature would request users to smile. Research has demonstrated that smiling (even forced ones) induces dopamine to help fight off stress.