At ElleHacks 2020, my teammates were international students who missed their friends and family often. We wanted to tackle the problem of international students facing loneliness and boredom.
I conducted research, prototyped, and created a business model. My work focused on understanding the problem space by speaking to other students and online resources.
Many existing therapy apps on the iOS App Store:
Limit input options
Don’t alleviate loneliness
Are poorly rated
I noticed that while the audience of the therapy apps faced restrictions in expressing themselves, they were inquisitive and continued to track their emotions. Our goal is to:
Students are the most vulnerable to loneliness. The target audience is young adults between the ages of 18-34.
We spoke to international students about their experience and validated assumptions through secondary research.
A change of environment can help combat feelings of isolation.
Culprits include losing childhood friends & seeing picture-perfect social media posts.
“Some days, the only people she talks to is the takeout delivery guy”
Self-help, therapy, and meditation apps are aimed to help people with their mental health.
Your human-touch companion for listening, venting, and empowering you with tools to face any situation—just like a friend.
Prompt is focused on the user. UX writing similarto how friends and family would encourage and stimulate conversation.
Talking removes barriers, allowing the user to share raw feelings. Conversation starts with single button and feels natural.
Creates "journal-like" experience for users to track, revisit, and learn from their emotional history.
Insightful recommendations are accessible regardless of user's daily input. They will help the user learn about what to do in various emotional states.
Understanding the user will allow the algorithm to create recommendations based on their preferences.
Resources based on emotions identified in a conversation, but are also accessible in the main navigation.
Ami offers text input. Users can text if they require or prefer chatting instead of using the voice function.
Through ML (sentiment analysis), Ami identifies that Eden is excited and celebrates with him.
Why is this important?
Ami further helps Eden with identifying the emotions its responding to Eden with.
Why is this helpful?
Users are able to talk, chat, vent, track, acquire resources, and learn from Ami.
My team resonated the feel with warm earth tones to reflect the connection to self. We chose shades of green in the colors, type, logo and imagery to represent self-growth.
Companies such as Spotify and Headspace can be embedded to suggest recommendations for their products and services that are catered towards our users’ needs. Other revenue streams can include affiliate links, streaming services, destinations (museums/cafe's). By using this model we can easily add more sponsorships from a diverse range of services.
Ami can be expanded into products through smart home appliances. Implementation in voice assistant devices, such as Google Home or Amazon Echo, Ami can deliver an impactful flow of conversation.
Validating in each iteration is very important and I would find at least 5 users to conduct usability tests with before proceeding.
Since this required a lot of subject matter knowledge, it’s important not to get stuck in rabbit holes. Have fun throughout.
