UPDATE: I published an extended article about BoM on Medium
Best of Me (BoM) was my first individual project in IronHack. It is a tamagotchi-like App designed to help people that suffer from depression, proposing different tasks and activities they have to do in their lives in order to develop and raise their pet BoM, which will improve as they do in real life.
We were given the freedom to choose a topic within the ‘Wellness’ category and I decided to focus on depression as the problem I wanted to solve.
After some research, and given my video games-related background, I saw the opportunity to jump straight into a heavily ‘gamified’ App. The research phase I developed during this project became one of the things I’m most proud of.
One of the tools I found most useful during my research phase was the interview. I got to talk with 2 renowned psychologists, 2 psychology students and a psychologist specialized in treating children. I also interviewed 4 depression patients, 2 of them with suicide attempts in their past. All of this helped me validate my ideas and allowed me to proceed with security into the following design phases.
UI
Color
The visual aspect of the project was very satisfactory. The palette I used was inspired by the colors of the open sky.
Typography
I used two similar fonts for different sizes to enhance the readability of small texts
Landing page
We were told to design a landing page for the product too, which was a challenge due to the little time left we got after the project itself, but in the end it was a good way to learn how to design something decent quickly.
Conclusions
Overall, I learnt a lot about research and UI, which was kind of challenging due to the presence of the pet and the need to get a color palette and overall visual style that helped giving the feeling of calm, self-acceptance and hope that I found necessary for this public.