Creative Bloke: A Motivational Product Idea
By: Sudeshna Adhikary
Tags: Case Study, UX Research, UX Design, Mobile App Design, Motivational App

So, What’s the Plan?

The best ideas arrive at late night or in the shower

The plan for Creative Bloke is to offer some activities that will best suit the user’s mood and will help them to unwind. It’s very simple if we look at the flow below. I’m bad at creating flowcharts — lost practice since 2011!! So, let me try words. I’m not bad at it ;)

Things to Remember

We must remember that a person undergoing a blockade in workflow will already be undergoing frustration or demotivation or any other sort of negative feeling. To ask the user to sign in or sign up as soon as the app launches will be like throwing a board on their face saying, “No Entry Unless You Play by Our Rules!!”

Not nice, is it?

So, I decided to give the user the liberty of using the application without signing up. However, the user will be requested to create an account whenever they try to save any activity or preference. We’ll come to that later. So, they can choose later between investing 2–3 minutes to sign up and discarding their activity or preferences.

How Do Things Start

Step 1:

I decided to start by understanding the mood of the already upset user. To begin with, the app can have six options for the mood. So, the first thing that the app will ask the user every time it is launched will be:

I’m feeling -

Angry

Frustrated

Anxious

Blank

Demotivated

Overwhelmed

These are the usual feelings that we unwantedly encounter while being neck-deep in work. Or maybe sometimes only our feet are stuck in the mud but our brain gets all whiny!

Step 2:

Once the user chooses any one of these moods, multiple options of activities will be presented to them. These include:

Scribble Doodle Colour pages Soothing tunes Positive quotes Motivational stories Funny stories Jokes Breathing exercises Karaoke Record own voice

These options will be presented to the user based on the mood selected in the previous step. However, if they want they can choose an activity outside of the ones given under the selected mood.

Step 3:

Once the desired activity is selected, the user can interact with it or can opt out and choose any other activity.

Step 4:

If the user is doing any creative activity, like scribbling or drawing or colouring pages or recording voice etc. then, if they want, they can save the output to their device or in cloud storage.

This is where the account creation comes in. The user will be prompted to create an account/log in order to save the work. So, it’s up to the user if they want to go ahead or discard the work. The app will never force the user to do something that they do not want.

Additionally, the user can save their preferences for activities like karaoke, breathing exercises and activities related to stories. Here again, the user will have to create an account/log in to do so.

Step 5:

Unlike most applications, Creative Bloke will never make the user stick to it. Being a UX researcher, I understand the value of both business need and user empathy. Finding a balance between the two is part of my job.

The user will be able to interact with each activity 5 times, unless the user opts out of the activity themselves. After 5 rounds of interaction with one activity, the user will receive a prompt saying something along the lines of, “Are you feeling better now?” With the meaning of the message remaining the same, the words will vary in order to avoid being mechanical and to avoid sounding monotonous. The user will be able to choose between “Yes” and “Not yet”.

If the user chooses “Yes”, then the app will politely ask the user to get back to work, and come back later for relaxation. If the user chooses “Not yet” then the app will ask the user if they would like to

a) try some other activity or

b) allow the app to suggest some activity for them

If the user chooses option (a), then the list of all activities will come up, thus allowing the user to choose the desired activity.

If the user chooses option (b), then the app will take the user to Step 1 where the user can select their current state of mind.

Other Notes

The app will allow the user to browse through and select any activity without setting the mood first. However, selecting a mood will provide them with a curated set of activities suitable for tackling that particular mood.

Wireframes

UI Design

Prototype

See the prototype in Figma here.