Tackling Low Self-Esteem with a Digital Service

An exploration of how we might use advanced technologies to support Digital Natives

Role: UX Design Intern

Focus: Research, UI/UX, Prototyping (lead)

Timeline: June 2018 — August 2018

CONTEXT

About NAVER Incubation Studio

The Incubation Studio is an internal research and development team acting as an outlet for experimental projects to test a hypothesis, validate with early feedback, and build on ideas that work.

Challenge

Create a digital service coupled with emerging technology to benefit users in their early twenties.

PROCESS

Understanding Our Target Users

In order to learn more about people in their early twenties, my team reached out to our respective networks including colleagues, friends, and family around the globe to conduct user interviews and surveys.

Insights

We synthesized the collected responses and data points through mind-mapping exercises to organize groups such as high school students, college students, and young adults. Despite the age differences in the respective groups, we noticed that the majority of people in their early twenties dealt with similar things:

• Social impact

• Low self-esteem

• Ambition and passion

• Desire to network and connect

Narrowing Down On a Problem Space

After individually coming up with proposition statements in the form of “how might we”, we were able to pressure test the feasibility of problem spaces and narrow down on low self-esteem as the problem we wanted to tackle. Through affinity mapping and discussion, we realized that other problems such as stress and societal standards were challenging because there are either other services already trying to solve the issue or we simply had less tangible control over it.

Learning About Low Self-Esteem

Through social blogs, science papers, surveys, and interviews, we learned that low self-esteem particularly within the college student population is triggered by the following reasons:

• Low motivation

• Unbalanced lifestyle

• Unrealistic goals

Here’s a deep-dive on self-esteem.

Competitive Analysis

We looked at apps that focused on journaling, meditation, and productivity, and learned that there are many shortcomings due to a lack of personalization. We realized the importance of avoiding “one-size fits all” solution especially around such sensitive issues. This challenged our team to think about how advanced technologies such as machine learning could help intelligently recommend and supplement our product experience.

Defining Key Product Features

First, we defined that our service would provided through a mobile experience, since we believed that this was the most appropriate platform for our targeted audience of college students. In our approach to product features, we decided not to tackle low self-esteem heads on. Rather, we thought of ways to train our users through raising overall confidence. The two product features we decided were essential for doing so were:

• Developing strengths

• Trying new things out

• Combatting an unhealthy lifestyle

Introducing Habits as Design Intervention

In order to manifest our product features into a fully functional product, we realized that our product features could be bridged together through the practice of healthy habits. What is unique about habits is that it allows individuals to define a new equilibrium in life. Not only do habits encourage a more balanced lifestyle, but they also enable people to try new things and to build upon strengths. This led us to formulate the following design principle:

• How might we raise self-esteem for students by motivating them to build achievable habits?

Defining User Work Flows

As a team, we asked ourselves what would be the essential steps in our experience to encourage habit practice and formation? In order to combat the biggest challenge of a lack of motivation, we pieced together our user flow to include three integral steps:

1. Habit discovery

2. Habit practice

3. Encouragement

Creating Key Interactions

FINAL CONCEPT

Break-Make: A mobile application that aims to boost self-esteem by helping users break bad habits and make new healthy ones.

Feature 1: Pairing Habits with a Recommendation Engine

During the on-boarding process, users are required to select a pair of habits: one that they would like to break and one they would like to make. Based on the habit that our user would like to break, our product identifies the resources that are acquired back such as time, money, and health - to then intelligently recommend appropriate new habits that they may now create.

Feature 2: Creating Bite-Sized Challenges

We learned through our research that breaking a habit down into reasonably incremental steps is extremely beneficial for users. Allowing individuals to win bigger battles through small victories will motivate them as they embrace the feeling of accomplishment.

Feature 3: Gamification and Rewards to Track Progress

Users collect tokens for completing challenges. They aggregate as collectible proof that progress towards habit formation has been made. This in-game currency can also be used to unlock more personalized suggestions - thus offering an experience more tailored to the user.

REFLECTION