I was attending my first semester of graduate school when my grandfather passed away in the Philippines. Overcome by grief, I channeled my emotional pain towards my final project: a phone app designed to help people express, heal, remember, and create, while grieving
"Today" is a concept for a phone app for users in grief. It combines aspects of a diary and art therapy for users to express themselves, by creating mandalas with entry data.
Using prototyping platform Pixate, I produced a version of the mandala-making feature. I did not produce a complete app, but designed the UX and outlined the experience of the app.
Choosing imagery
I decided on making the mandala the central image of the app's interface. The mandala is the Hindu-Buddhist icon of impermanence, life, death, and transience. It is a major icon from the Hindu-Buddhist cosmology. I wanted to incorporate the making of a mandala into the app, as a metaphor for the life of the deceased the user is grieving.
Sketching user flow
Designing wireframes
Pixate Wireframes
Paper prototyping
To prototype the experience, I asked users to draw shapes from a list of pre-selected shapes, in colored marker.
The paper shown here acts as a prototype for an interface for users to choose colors and shapes.
User-testing videos
I recorded videos of users testing various iterations of the mandala-making interface of my prototype.