Cura

💢 Problem & Solution

2020 was not the year for everyone and we can all agree Covid-19 was to blame. With strict lockdown restrictions lasting for months on end, it had us all uneasy and impacted many psychologically.

As a group of four, we wanted to create a platform where women could easily access simple self-care practices on the go and act as a connection hub for them to talk and share resources on self-care with other users.

Before going into the design stage, we needed to first understand how people were coping during the pandemic, what self-care meant to them and how often they practiced it.

📋 Primary Research

We used two types of data collection methods: online surveys and interviews. We interviewed eight individuals and received a total of 41 responses from the survey from which we were able to generate key metrics and insights in our demographic and their feelings towards self-care and social media.

These were the set of questions that we had prepared:

1. What electronic device do you use most? 
2. What app do you believe you'd spend the most time on? 
3. Do you use that app, or any other app, to practice any form of self-care? 
4. Stemming from that, what does self-care mean to you? 
5. How often do you practice self-care?
6. Which is your favourite social media platform? 
7. What do you spend the majority of your time doing on social media? 
8. While you're using the app, what kind of activities do you partake in? 
9. What platform do you use most to connect with people? How does that connection look? Is it verbal? Visual?
10. What is your least favourite aspect of connecting with people online?
11. What is  your favourite aspect of connecting with people online? 
12. How often do you use social media to practice self-care? 

When analyzing the data we collected, some common themes that we found were:

• Mobile phones were the most used electronic device, however people have started using their laptop/PC to do remote work
• Instagram, Facebook and Youtube were the applications that people spent the most time on
• Participants follow Youtube videos to practice self-care 
• Many said their least favorite aspect of social media is how addictive it is and find themselves mindlessly scrolling for countless hours, and are left with a sense of unproductivity.
• There was a variety of responses when interview participants were asked, 'How often do you practice self-care?' but it depended on their own definition of self-care with some believing that self-care is "doing things you enjoy". 

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👤 User Persona

Using the research that we gathered, I created a persona that reflects the target users' struggles ábout maintaining a healthy lifestyle in the face of the pandemic.

📈 Userflow Chart

I have created a userflow chart to help visualize what the process of each task would look like for the user from start to finish.

✏ User Interaction Sketches

📝 Prototype Design

Once the research and sketching phase was over, we were tasked with developing branding and the prototype. During the time of this project, I had originally designed the app using Axure, a prototyping tool supported by Swinburne. Given this software is very outdated, I redesigned the app using Figma to obtain better results.

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📱 Usability Testing

I was able to gather four participants to test my interaction prototype and based on the feedback, the testing was a success and I recieved overwhelmingly positive feedback but there were some minor aspects that needed to be changed such as font size being too small.

For the branding, I wanted to incorporate a heart motif in the logo because I felt that this best represented the idea of self-care. The idea of using the heart as a flower symbolizes healing and nurturing one’s well-being in a physical and mental sense.