(by https://medium.com/@mastropietro.s/selfup-766d7395528a)
I worked in a team with two other coders and a designer, where I experienced a complete learning cycle based on the development of a working prototype. The first phase was to move from a big idea to a challenge statement using the essential interrogation process.We focused on health (OUR BIG IDEA) and wondered “how people can take care of their health?”. Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not just the absence of disease and infirmity. The concept of physical well-being is easy to understand, but mental and social well-being depends on the definition of each person. Of course, health professionals can answer this question in different ways, however, the truth is that the definition of these aspects varies from person to person.
An action that can lead in bad mental health, which is very common among youngsters, is overuse of social media. Some finding reports that excessive exposure to social media can lead in severe conditions such as depression and anxiety; they can affect the quality and duration of sleeping, that impact almost any aspect of our lives. Social media is still necessary for many people, specially now days. The proposal of my team is not create an app for quit social media, but to give people an alternative that allows them to have control over the time.Some findings report small habits to follow in order to achieve “easily” a good mental state. Some of them are: Smile more, Work out, Walk, Reflect, Ask For Help, Master a Skill and many more. Analysing them, we found out that there’s a link within some of them. This link is related to abilities.Abilities and staying active (both physically and mentally) are the key to an healthy life.These abilities are divided into two categories: soft skills and hard skills. Soft skills are personal skills, for example feeling good about yourself and others.Hard skills, instead, are all that you earn by working hard. Soft skills make it easier to form relationships with people, create trust, lead teams and, of course, work better. These skills can be really easy to achieve and improve, step by step and day by day.There are many soft skills a person can develop. For the first version of selfup we wanted to focus on three different useful abilities that an user can easily practice day by day. Those are self building, for a better self confidence. Creative Thinking, to always stimulate ourselves and Problem Solving, to keep our mind awake. Seeing the link between social media addiction and soft skills benefits, we thought of an App that helps potential Social Network addicts who want to develop additional soft skills by doing activities in order to reach goals and limiting social network usage.
For the design of our app we used the Human Interface Guidelines, a set of suggestions to make easy-to-use applications for iOS. In the overview of selfup we have the most important soft skill. the first is self building, here the user can tell his day and his thoughts. This way he has the illusion of talking to another person without receiving negative feedback.
The second is creative thinking, here the user can give vent to his creative side by completing a draft. He can use different devices like marker, eraser, pen and pencil and different shades of color and also the opacity. The user can also save or delete his opera.
The last is problem solving here the system gives to the user a sort of anagram. If the user write a correct word, the system collect it, while if the word is wrong, we receive a notification to change the word.
In our app remembers are so important. they remember to the user when he have to use it, so with the passing of the time the app create a relationship with the user, similar to a friendship, because it’s present in every event of his life. And of course he can chose the name and the hours of the remainder.
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