Hi! I'm Kati. I'm currently an Elementary School Counselor aspiring to broaden my horizons into the UX world. I love mental health. I have a knack for technology. I want to merge these two interests and use my unique skill set to design technology that makes people better humans and enhances their lifestyles. 

Enter Mind Body Soul... an app designed to help women find their best selves by combining physical health, mental health, and medical needs all into one location. 

I identified four potential problems in the lifestyles of my target audience and came up with solutions that Mind Body Soul could provide to facilitate growth in my users.

 I moved on to a competitive analysis of Results Wellness Lifestyle and Lean with Lilly, two apps that have had lots of success in this industry. Lean with Lilly is actually an app that I've personally used to begin my fitness journey. I've had great success with using this app to improve my own mental and physical health battles.

The executive summary below is a high level summary of the insights gained from the competitive analyses performed on Results Wellness Lifestyle and Lean with Lilly.

With all the research in mind, functional requirements and a delivery schedule were created. I am very much a type A personality, so I appreciated a good list/schedule to guide the timeline of the project.

Next step... user interviews! I chose people within my sphere of influence that I thought would fit the target audience for the app and began interviewing. The affinity map below was a fun way to organize those responses in one place and identify similarities/differences in each interview. 

It's amazing what you can discover from an affinity map! Check out the findings and insights below that correspond with the user interviews... 

These user personas may be my favorite part of the whole project... I enjoyed channeling different life problems/aspirations that I see around me into an imaginary person. I also love the visual look of these personas.

User flows allowed me to map out some of the key functions of the app before actually designing the sitemap... Seeing these laid out shows you just how complicated designing app functions can get.

This was the initial sitemap of the app. I felt relieved after creating this because the chaos in my head was finally mapped out on paper. After some further research (card sorting), it became clear that users thought of fitness and nutrition in the same umbrella. I took those insights and modified the components from five to four- physical health, mental health, medical, and profile.

Low fidelity wireframes led to these mid fidelity wireframes. I quickly learned that while I'm capable of working with Adobe XD, it's not my favorite. I redesigned the whole prototype in Figma... That hurt a bit, but I felt much better afterwards because the next step was more testing. Overall, I feel more comfortable using Figma considering it's web based and a little more user friendly.

I got high praises from my tutor on my usability test script. Below are the tasks participants were asked to complete. Devising this actually came natural to me... Perhaps because I'd already been through usability test screening before in the previous class. I do feel like the research part of the design process is where I'm more inclined to be though. Also, I decided here to switch from Body Mind Soul to Mind Body Soul. It sounded better, and I feel like if we can get the mind right... the body and soul follows.

Usability testing was fun... I like seeing an actual idea come to life and being able to work with others to fine tune it. Maybe it's the counselor in me, but I love really listening to users as they interact with the app to get solid feedback. Taking their thoughts and seeing the commonalities among them allows you to easily see where you need to go back and work a little harder. 

Studying emotional design and visual design principles might have been my favorite part of the whole course... It's where my ideas really started to flesh out in terms of the UI look and feel of the design. The assignment above reflects the heart of the UX design behind the app.