Bloom - a ritual to cope with anxiety
A service to help 18-40-year-old professionals suffering from General Anxiety Disorder, to better manage their stress and anxiety proactively. Bloom helps form a ritual of daily routines and identify cognitive distortions to keep anxiety attacks at bay.
Research and Synthesis
I interviewed people who suffer from mild to severe anxiety to get a better understanding of their needs, goals, and behaviors to better define the functionalities of the Bloom service. Through my interviews, and after synthesizing the research findings, I was able to derive these key insights:
Recognizing irregular breathing and trying to regularize it without guidance can cause more anxiety.
Pets play a big role in a person’s emotional well-being, but the responsibility of taking care of an animal as a pet adds to the feeling of anxiety.
Resilient plants inspire individuals with anxiety to become resilient themselves.
Incorporating physical activities into a routine can keep anxiety at bay.
Having daily rituals brings a sense of control and consistency that helps reduce anxiety.
Usability Testing
I created and tested multiple paper prototypes of the Bloom mobile app. This helped me determine what works and what doesn’t about my current design.
Epics and Stories
I then defined the user conceptual model as well as a series of epics and stories to build task flows for the different use-cases.
Bloom - User Conceptual Model
Design Stories across devices
Taskflow - Logging into the Service
Taskflow - Activity Prompts
Taskflow - Create Profile
Taskflow - Ritualize Activity
Task Flow for Bloom Login
Log Anxiety Relief Activity
Mapping out the entire Bloom service system has helped me define what should be included as part of the service. Detailing the functionalities of the service for a mobile app, a tablet app, and a desktop app helped me define, with clarity, the differences between the three platforms; Why they should or shouldn’t function a certain way and, what would be required to refine each of them. This process provides a clear, bird’s eye view of my design concept.
This process made me think of interaction design as a person. If the concept is the skeletal structure, the epics, user stories and task flows provide the muscles and networks to make the skeleton stronger. There are so many hidden layers that make an application an application. For example, if an application were a person, what users would see is just the UI - the clothes. But the service/application would fall apart without the hidden anatomy - the body behind the UI. This foundational aspect of what user experience design encompasses is why I love being an interaction designer. I look forward to mapping my concepts and thinking them through in a similar fashion going forward.
