As part of a UX/UI Design student project at Ironhack focused on the topic of Wellness, my classmate Mateus Teixeira and I designed Moodler - an app to help restless visually-minded people to develop a regular habit of doodling as a mental health strategy. We wanted to reduce the stigma around doodling as we found there are so many benefits which include processing emotions, improved concentration, and also simply for fun. We gave the app the name Moodler as a combination of "mood" and "doodler", and also designed the whole branding including logo, illustrations, and icons.
Click the photo to open our Hi-Fi prototype design and explore it for yourself in Figma. Try out creating today's doodle by clicking "Start today's doodle" and then "Get inspired" and choosing "Scenes" and then "Paradise".
I designed the logo for Moodler that combines the letter M with a doodle and a smiley face.
We wanted the app to have a sketchy feel so I designed all buttons and icons to have a hand-drawn effect. Given the target user is someone who is very visual, we also wanted to include some illustrations at the key success points in the app, so I also designed some characters that look hand-drawn.
We discovered a huge amount of research on the many positive benefits of doodling. We came across a British doodling and handwriting expert Tracy Trussel, who uses doodles to anaylsis people's state-of-mind and thinks of doodles as non-verbal messages that surface from the unconscious. Doodling also improves focus and memory retention by on average 30%. Doodling can also create a state of flow like an “open-eye meditation” whereby the left hemisphere of the brain slows down and enables the right side of the brain to enter into a creative mode.
We looked into apps in the spaces of art making with habit tracking, mood tracking, and mindfulness which included Art Therapy, 5-Minute Journal, Headspace, Habatica, and Mood Kit. Moodler though currently has no direct competitors and has a niche in the marketplace that combines all of these features into one app.
We interviewed 5 people who were regularly doodling in our class. It was interesting to hear the themes of our secondary research also cropping up in the interviews. We heard several times about people doodling to focus and using doodling to calm and process their emotions, as a form of self therapy. We also though heard about the stigma that revolves around doodling, that it's often seen as a form of not focusing and procrastinating.
We also sent out a quantitive survey to further understand doodling habits and received responses from 29 people. We found that 83% only use one colour whilst doodling and 97% use pen and paper to doodle instead of anything digital. When ask what people normally doodle, the majority said shapes, randomness, and people. We also found that the majority doodle whilst listening to presentations, music and on the phone. The main reason that 41% doodle is to cure boredom/fill time, whilst 24% do it for pleasure, and 21% to process their emotions. We also found that 62% prefer not the share their doodles and only keep them to themself, and 66% would like to doodle more at least once a week.
We imagined a user persona for Moodler, Tracy. Tracy is 21 and lives in Köln. She's a student with a part-time retail job, and enjoys dancing, watching Anime, and of course drawing. She has anxiety and is looking to develop a regular strategy to calm herself, but finds it hard to sit still long enough to meditate or journal. When she doodles she feels most calm but feels judged by others when she does doodle.
Tracy's day would start with a lecture at uni where she would feel alert and attentive, by the second lecture though she would start to lose attention and so in the third lecture she finds herself doodling which helps her to feel calm and focused. The lecturer though calls her out in front of the class for doodling and not focusing and so goes home feeling anxious. She feels better after hanging out with her flatmates but then finds herself scrolling on her phone late into the night.
After empathising with doodlers, we were then able to identify the key problem to solve.
This led us to the following key question.
This lead us to come to the conclusion that we wanted to design an app to help people develop a regular habit of doodling as a way of mindfulness, and at the same time normalising doodling as a wellness activity and therefore reducing the stigma.
We designed a user flow from Homescreen through to the Dashboard.
Given there seemed to be several reasons why people tend to doodle, we designed to allow for several types of doodling options: changing your mood, processing emotions, get inspired, developing drawing skills, and doodling for fun. We received the feedback during user testing that they would like to see more of the 'get inspired' flow
To combine the visuals of doodling with the results of our secondary and user research, we chose the brand attributes "Elementary", "Sketchy", and "Expressive".
We wanted to represent these brand attributes with line-drawn illustrations with emotive expressions much like doodles themselves. Inspired by our research results indicating 97% use only one colour to doodle, we also wanted to include references that use a monochromatic colour palette.
During user testing, we received the feedback from several users that they liked the "Inspire Me" doodling prompts and so we focused our attention on developing this user flow first. We also had initially set the timer to 5-minutes counting down with the option to extend if you wish, and some users said that felt stressful and would prefer for the timer to start from 0 and count up open-endedly, which we implemented in the Hi-Fi design.
Further user testing feedback we received and would like to implement next would be to remove the bottom right arrow on the Inspire Me nativagation screens, and just be able to navigate to the next screen automatically by selecting a category. It would also be great to make the inspure me tags more visual by complimenting the text with an illustration (e.g. Paradise would have a palm illustration).
The next steps for the prokect would be to further develop the Doodle Journey dashboard to be able to select different time-frame views of your past doodles. It would also be great to develop the Doodle Analysis of Freq. Shapes sections to suggest the potental meaning of the doodles based on the psychology we learnt in our secondary research. We also had the idea to create a feature where you can share your doodles with friend if you wish, which we would call the "Doodboard", though we didn't prioritise this idea given the user research results indicate only 38% of people would be interested in sharing their doodles. We would also like to further develop the user flow for the "change your mood" section, where we would guide the user through certain steps to target certain moods such as anxious, stress, tired into more positive moods. We additionally had the idea to develop a feature to integrate the app with other music and podcast apps given our research indicated the majority of doodling happens whilst listening. Finally we would like to develop a feature to personalise your goals and also notifications to attach the doodling to certain locations and times of the day (at school, at work etc.)
I really enjoyed working on this student project and felt inspired to develop an app in a completely new area of wellness. I leart a lot from this project as it went through all stages of my design skillset from UX research, concept, naming, branding, illustration, iconography, and finally UI design, and of course testing. And we've ended up with a design for Moodler that I'm extremely proud of.