Do you ever find yourself being so stressed out and looking for a quick mindless distraction? Something that gives you a temporary spark of joy? Well here comes buddy, you own little personal friend: with you, on your phone, at all times.

There is a saying:

‘‘When life throws you lemons together we make lemonade!’’

Introduction:

I was thinking about those days when I was under a lot of pressure and looked for a quick escape; was it quickly opening up Asos to browse new clothing, reaching for that Snickers bar, or watching those puppy videos over and over again. Just to lower those cortisol levels, and refocus again.

We decided to get together in a team and start developing an idea for an app that would deal with stress and anxiety, the sprint length was 2 weeks where we applied the Lean UX Process.

User Interviews:

We decided to do some user interviews with several young professionals, to see how they go about dealing with stress especially when at work. We just got an overall feeling of what people do these days to relieve stress, how it makes them feel, and what they enjoy doing as a relief.

It was not easy to interview people because we were touching on very personal feelings, which we felt they didn’t want to talk about but it helped us a lot to see a pattern in behavior as in how they dealt with stress at different times.

After the user interviews, we did affinity mapping:

We came up with the following insights:

• Users’ moods were affected by stress throughout the day

• Users developed certain habits such as eating junk food in excess to alleviate stress

• Users developed insomnia from ongoing stress

User Persona:

After synthesizing the interviews we came up with a target persona, Fiona, a young professional who has a high-stress level career in advertising:

User Journey:

We also created the user journey for Fiona:

As you can see Fiona is experiencing her low point when she gets so stressed about her new project, that she is not even able to start it with it, which might delay her getting the project accomplished. We definitely wanted to focus on the low points of Fiona’s user journey.

User Goals:

We just wanted to outline the user goals before we would start defining the problem statement:

• Users want to experience their workday stress free

• Users want to have a little distraction when a day gets too heavy

• Users want to be able to relax a bit at any moment, wherever they are

Problem Statement:

We came up with the following statement:

‘‘Professionals need a way to to reduce stress at work because fear of failure hurts their productivity.’’

How might we:

• cheer up, distract and relax people when and while they are dealing with stressful situations at work and also other areas in their life?

• provide temporary relief which will benefit people in the long run, and not compromise their productivity?

We came up with the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis Statement:

‘‘We believe that creating an aid to help people reduce their anxiety levels, distract them when needed, and cheer them up occasionally, will have a small impact on a daily basis, thus will gradually reduce anxiety levels, reduce bad vices and boost productivity/happiness levels.

We will only know this to be true once companies, that make their employees use our app, will inform us of an increase in employee productivity and of overall satisfied employees.’’

Ideation and Design Studio:

We did some sketching and storyboarding:

User Flow:

Storyboarding helped to create a user flow for Fiona using the app:

Low Fi Wireframes:

Here we went on create the first wireframes, to be used for paper prototype testing:

Paper Prototype Testing:

We then did user testing with several users:

Some of the insights from user testing:

• The little robot mascot was the most favorite feature in the app

• Users react emotionally to any comments or compliments from the mascot even though he is only a digital bot

• Users want to jump straight to the activities, app is initiating users to become active

Hi-Fi Digital Wireframes:

Went on to digitize our paper wireframes:

Brand Creation:

The brand voice of Buddy:

‘‘ Friendly, Fun, Relaxing!’’

The brand position:

Style Guide Creation:

We went on to create a style guide for the buddy app:

Typography:

We used the font Cortado for the Buddy Logo, and ChaletLondonNineteenSixty for text in the app:

Mood Board:

Color Guide:

We chose monochromatic purples for the app in HEX code:

Iconography:

We came up with the different icon designs for the different activities:

Logo Design:

We also designed the Buddy Logo in different options:

Final Mockups/Visual Design:

And finally, the final mockups of the Buddy App:

Next Steps:

Our next steps going forward with the Buddy App are:

• Add more interactive features like taking pictures/videos

• Work together with retail, leisure and food businesses to link users to healthy living

• Work with companies to promote the Buddy App amongst their employees

• Expand extensively on the bot features

• Develop into a social platform where buddy users can connect with each other