Calm mental-wellbeing support for work stress.
A Lean UX case study translating interview synthesis, affinity themes, and Olivia Banks’ persona into low-pressure check-ins, journaling, meditation, and progress tracking.
A busy health-services manager feels emotionally off-balance from sustained work stress and needs a calmer way to check in with herself.
An iOS wellbeing app for emotional check-ins, journaling, guided meditation, and progress tracking.
Working professionals managing daily stress — represented by the persona Olivia Banks, 35.
Solo — UX research, interaction design, UI design, usability testing. (FID coursework, 2023.)
Figma · Photoshop · Lean UX methods · Nielsen heuristic evaluation.
Persona, affinity synthesis, problem framing, user flow, hi-fi iOS prototype, usability evaluation.
Olivia manages health services and lives far from family in a foreign country. Her demanding job leaves her emotionally off-balance — and even with free time after work, the stress lingers at home, making it hard to relax, reflect, or feel in control of her own wellbeing.
Sourced from the WellAI problem scenario (FID Usability Report, 2023). No invented statistics.
“How might we help a working professional notice, process, and ease daily emotional stress — without it feeling clinical or like one more task on the list?”
The case study uses the original interview summary and affinity synthesis as proof of process, then connects those findings to the persona and interface decisions below.
35 · Health Services Manager · away from family support
Original persona artefact retained for evidence. Refined card re-typeset for portfolio readability — content unchanged.
Stress lingers after work — the moment of need is during the day, not in a scheduled session.
Design opportunityMake emotional check-ins quick and always one tap away.
She’s private — she’d rather self-reflect than share publicly.
Design opportunityPrioritise journaling and personal tracking over social features.
She wants to feel progress, not just complete tasks.
Design opportunitySurface a progress tracker and Well-Being Score to make change visible.
The app centres on a daily loop — an emotional check-in opens the session, a supportive activity (journaling or meditation) follows, and progress tracking closes it so change feels visible over time.
Flow reconstructed in Figma from the real screen set. [Reconstructed from available project artefacts]
Stress hits during the day, not on a schedule.
A one-tap emotional check-in as the primary entry point.
Begin Check-In screen
Too much content on one screen confused the test user (Nielsen: consistency).
Simplified the mood-input screen and kept patterns consistent across the app.
Mood selection screen
She wants to see change, not just complete tasks.
A progress tracker with a mood graph and Overall Well-Being Score.
Progress Tracker screen
Design responses map to real Nielsen heuristic findings from the 2023 usability evaluation.
A calm deep-indigo system with lavender accents, generous spacing, and soft cards — six key screens across the check-in, activity, and tracking flows.
WelcomeBegin Check-In
Journaling prompt
Breathe & ResetProgress Tracker
History & Insights
Mood graph over the week — answers Olivia’s need to notice patterns, not just log a moment.
Journal + Meditation completion chips — make the daily loop feel finished without pressure.
Overall Well-Being Score — the single ‘am I improving?’ signal she asked for. Makes change visible.
A participant reviewed seven screens using Nielsen’s heuristics. The useful portfolio story is not a score — it is what changed after the violation, and what stayed because it worked.
Mood-input screen (#5)
Too much content on one screen — and it looked and behaved differently from the rest of the app.
What I changed / keptSimplified the mood-input layout and brought it back in line with the app’s shared patterns.
Mood-input screen (#5)
The participant could easily choose a mood type and felt in control of the selection.
What I changed / keptKept the mood picker open and low-commitment — no forced paths.
Journaling & tracker (#2, #8)
The participant understood that typing led to the next step, and located the mood tracker without help.
What I changed / keptKept clear forward affordances and a discoverable tracker entry point.
Findings are from the 2023 FID Usability Report: Nielsen heuristic evaluation, seven screens, one participant — no quantitative claims.
The concept was prototyped in Figma and evaluated in a usability session using Nielsen’s heuristics across seven screens. Findings led to clearer mood-input and more consistent patterns. The output is a high-fidelity concept prototype — not a shipped product, and with no real-world usage metrics claimed.
Click through the full check-in → activity → progress experience.
Open Figma →Test whether the one-tap check-in actually fits into a stressful workday, and whether the well-being score motivates return visits.
WellAI taught me to translate a real person’s emotional needs into restrained interface decisions: a check-in that doesn’t demand much, journaling that respects privacy, and progress that motivates without pressure. Working from interview to affinity synthesis to persona to usability testing made the design decisions defensible — each screen traces back to a research finding, not a guess.