Background info
Designed
September 2021-May 2022
Skills
UI Design, UX Design, UX Research, User Testing, Prototyping, Illustration
Tools
Miro, Dribbble, Medium, Notion, Goodnotes, Figma, Pencil and Paper, Google Suite
Main Info
What is solace?
Solace is more than just a remote therapy app- it’s a holistic therapy experience. By helping users to set clear goals and critically assess their mental wellbeing throughout the therapy process, we aim to help users manage their mental health in the long term.
Target Market
User Type- Clients (20-35 yrs old)
This type of user will be using Solace to find a therapist and learn how to better manage their mental health.
User Type- Therapists (30-45 yrs old)
This type of user will be using solace as a means of finding clients, scheduling appointments and managing their finances.
User personas
From the information that I gathered from a number of online surveys, I was able to get a better idea of what my users needed from Solace. I put all of this into a ‘User persona’ ; a document breaking down who the user is and what they want to gain from a remote therapy app.
This helped me to put together a ‘User story map’, where I recorded everything that the user needed to do in the app and broke this down into different ‘sections’ or app screens. This really helped me to gain a much clearer insight into the app’s navigation and was especially beneficial in the wireframing/ prototyping phase.
Branding
When creating a brand for Solace, I wanted to take what I had learned from my user research and competitive analysis to create a remote therapy app that people would rely on and trust.
I felt that a simple illustration of a growing plant helped to represent a user’s growth and development, whilst the beams of light represented a source of energy and growth.
The overall colour scheme of the brand was a combination of blues with highlights of mustard yellow, as I wanted to go for something simple yet vibrant.
App Design
When designing the layout for Solace, I wanted users to be able to easily navigate between the different sections of the app. In order to gain a better understanding of what the user needed in order to move through the experience, I drafted quick flow designs to break down each step into its simplest parts.
By developing a solid user flow, I was able to quickly gain a sense of the app's general layout. Using Miro's wireframing tool, I was able to create a lo-fi wireframe to test on users within a relatively short space of time. By testing out my product with a number of different users, I was able to see what adjustments needed to be made before translating my designs into hi fidelity wireframes on Figma. This really helped to make the final product much more cohesive and user friendly as a result.
Strengths
After looking back at my final year project, I have a lot to be proud of. I’m incredibly pleased to see how far my skills in branding and UI have developed over the past year, as it is something which I have struggled with in the past. I have also learned so much more about user research and UX design over the last year, which really helped to enhance the final product.
Weaknesses
Whilst I am proud of my finished product, there are still some things that I might change about Solace today. I might have simply focused on the client’s experience for the final prototype instead of giving myself additional work by fleshing out log in screens for therapists. This cost me time that could have been better allocated towards wireframing, user research and prototyping.
