Designing for digital wellbeing
Alaia is a digital wellness product that aims to help children easily navigate and at the same time promote a positive attitude and a healthy mindset. The ever-increasing addiction to devices like smartphones and tablets among young children has had a profound impact on their emotional and mental wellbeing.
The app focus on 3 aspects
The landscape
To understand the market, i researched on competitors and found their key features according to marketing and user reviews. The benchmarking of the apps helped in developing a visual language and setting a level of polish for the app.
Aligning and Understanding client requirements
As a new product coming to the market, it was important to make client visualize the product journey and prioritize on what to implement. creating small wireflows helped in getting every stakeholder together and add their views on it.
Once the features got prioritized, the wireflows were reiterated and fleshed out to create wireframes for the app.
Wireframing
Creating a visual language
As a new product, it is important for alaia to have a theme to associate with. How would it relate to it's users. From the stakeholder, a few keywords were collected that would represent the brand. To develop that into a visual language, mood boards were created. the visuals and typography helped in reducing confusion among people and directed everyone to a desirable visual style.
selected moodboard
Evolution of visual design
The minimal design helped focus first on the content. From the wireframes, adding layers of visual elements and colors h
Initial design
Iteration
Final Visual
The design was optimized and the interaction polished after validating each design iterations with potential users.
The users were more focused on the score, so the part in UI was highlighted to capture attention..
The mindfulness player
The mindfulness was one of the key features of alaia. It let the use have an assistive meditation session with an ambient sound of their choice. The sessions helped user relieve stress, relax and help enjoy moments of the day. The sessions ranged from 5 mins small sessions to 20 min immersive audio. The design for the player had to feel relaxing and less intrusive.
As the project covered multiple device platforms, maintaining consistency was key throughout the process.
The smartphone version had a simple features as changing volume and ambience. It also displayed keywords help user know what the session is about.
The web version would have the screen on for the session, so the screen had navigtion options, a full page visualization than a subtle wave compared to smartphone. Also, the player can be minimized by user to be played in background.
While large screens had more space , those were utilized by adding more detail and adapting to UI similar to large display video players.
Final words
At the end , Alaia in it's core is a parenting application. But incentivizing child to use it and not make the screentime enforced was also a key goal. This particular goal was succeeded by gearing the app towards the needs and wants of their respective users.
During 8-month courses of time spent refining the initial concept of Alaia to its MVP and few first iterations, the biggest challenge would be finding the right balance between parents, stakeholders and children's ask. Having time spent with them, I could empathize to help build a better product.