Designed an AI journaling app that allows college students to easily express their emotions without fear of judgement
This case study was submitted for INFO 3450, my Human Computer Interaction (HCI) course.
6 UX Designers
Figma
Adobe XD
While being at an academic rigorous and competitive institution like Cornell provides immense opportunities, this culture creates an unstable environment for mental health.
I experienced this first-hand freshman year, as a pre-med, when my mental health spiraled after a shooting incident involving my grandmother. What was the point of learning when I couldn’t save my own grandmother? I felt useless and alone. The added academic rigor of my courses led to a cycle of self-hate and anxiety. I didn’t want anyone else to feel as miserable as I did.
Unfortunately, I'm not alone.
According to the Healthy Minds survey published in 2023, over 60% of college students meet the criteria for at least one mental health problem, a 50% increase from 2013.
44 percent of students reported symptoms of depression; 37 percent said they experienced anxiety; and 15 percent said they were considering suicide — the highest rate in the 15-year history of the survey. More than 90,000 students across 133 U.S. campuses participated in the survey.
Source: National Education Association
Now, two years later, I find out that I’m assigned to the topic of mental wellness for my design course, and well, here’s my take on it.
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To understand how to improve the mental wellness of college students, my group conducted a total of 12 interviews with students regarding mental wellness. We created journey maps of our users and combined them into a chart to identify user groups.
🎯 We identified a total of 6 user groups but chose to proceed with users who are considering to begin therapy but failed to do so.
After identifying our target group, we created our persona. Meet the star of our show, Droopy Drew!
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With our persona set, we started brainstorming multiple problems that Droopy Drew might face and chose the best problem:
Droopy Drew struggles with finding an outlet for expressing her feelings and emotions.
Therefore, our vision is to make it easier for Droopy Drew to find an outlet to express feelings and emotions.
We brainstormed value proposition design ideas and the top 3 we decided were:
However, we were stumped on a question: what differs this from just using ChatGPT?
We shifted the idea to be an 📒 AI Journal, which will prompt users to answer questions to efficiently express their emotions, making it faster than traditional journaling.
Afterwards, our group generated storyboards and user journeys based on this idea.
We proceeded by conducting another round of interviews to see students’ thoughts on the initial storyboards and whether this accurately represented them.
Based on this information, we updated our storyboards to not be limited to the start of college:
Participants were also concerned that the AI Journal might be ineffective. Based on the feedback, we decided on the following features:
Based on this, we created low-fidelity wireframes. We split the user flow into days because it helps to provide consistency and allows for progress tracking.
We continued to conduct interviews and gather students’ feedback.
Based on the feedback, one notable feature we created was a customizable avatar to target the lack of a human presence, an issue we were unsure of before. I designed Rabbisaur, a dinosaur that helps to guide users throughout the app:
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Through user research and feedback, we identified the need for an accessible and personalized outlet for expressing emotions. After exploring various solutions, we developed the AI Journal, featuring daily questionnaires, an onboarding process, calendar integration, and the ability to include physical mementos. This design ensures consistency, manageability, and personalized feedback, making the AI Journal a valuable resource for students seeking mental wellness support.
One moment that will stay with me forever is when my professor pointed out that it takes real courage to speak up for the people who use technology. Product designers have the responsibility to be the voice for those who can’t speak for themselves. That insight completely shifted how I view design, reminding me to always put people first.
I’m also incredibly grateful to my teammates for their dedication and initiative, especially Jennifer and Daniel. Jennifer, our leader, was the glue that held us together - organizing meetings, setting goals, and keeping us on track. Daniel, our design lead, took charge and guided the team all the way to the showcase. Their hard work and leadership made everything possible, and I feel truly fortunate to have had them as my teammates.
It’s actually funny because the team that won first place ended up using the AI conversational plushie idea - something we had eliminated early on because users found it “creepy” and “weird.” But in the end, we have no regrets. We’re happy we listened to our users and designed a product that truly worked for them, because, after all, they’re the ones who matter most :)
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