Overview
As part of a design team, I helped create Mindsight, a mindfulness and emotional resilience app. Initially assisting with various UX tasks, I soon found myself responsible for key features that shaped the emotional experience of the app: AI expert coaching and anonymous sticker-sharing features. Additionally, I contributed to improving the UX of emotions tracking, ensuring users had a more intuitive way to express their emotions.
Team
Timeline
Tools
Challenge Highlight
Problem Statement
When your job revolves around helping others — supporting others, dedicating yourself to service, giving your energy every day — your own well-being often takes a backseat. This was the reality for many of our users. So, Mindsight's goal was to help employees working in high-stress and emotionally intensive environments.
As I listened to our users, I found that:
People wanted to feel seen and supported. So:
The Question:
Process
Research
User Interviews
Desk Research
Competitor Analysis
Synthesis
Interview Analysis
Persona
AI Bot Personality
Ideation
Design Ideas
Flowcharts
Wireframes
Design
Final Design
Prototype
Review
QA Tests & Updates
Post Design
Research Results
User Interviews
Before jumping into designs, we wanted to understand the challenges of our users and how they deal with them.
So I interviewed 7 employees from a high-pressure and emotionally demanding workplace.
I analyzed the interview data using Affinity diagram to get insights and brainstorm design ideas:
After analyzing the interviews, I found that:
Employees experience:
Extremely busy schedule
Our users work a lot!
Stress, secondary trauma, anxiety, depression, and burnout
As social workers, they have emotionally demanding workload.
To cope with mental challenges, employees prefer:
Solo well-being methods
Like breathing exercises, self-reflection, and mood tracking.
Social support
Like talking to someone, peer support, and seeking help from experts.
But many employees don't want to:
Spend too much time on consultations
They can spend less than 25 min for the whole experience.
Share personal details about their struggles
They don't want to pressure others and share personal sensitive information.
Watch the same mindfulness videos as offered by other platforms
"There must be a difference from YouTube and other SNS stuff."
Research Results
Desk Research
Then, I wanted to understand how to satisfy users' needs and offer support they actually needed. So I conducted a desk research.
Based on research findings, I found that:
Insight 1:
*Based on UNHCR Report, Harvard Business Review, and Wikipedia
Synthesis
Persona
Based on research insights, I developed three personas that represented the characteristics of our users:
Ideation
The Inspiration: Little Things That Meant a Lot
The most impactful moments came from simple gestures in everyday life ✨
I didn’t immediately know what the solution was. To understand how to deal with mental problems, our team took field trips to experience art therapy, meditations, and breathing techniques in person. Even though these therapies were helpful, there was something else that helped me to recharge on bad days.
I’d leave something too — little doodles, cute pictures, or a cup of coffee.
These weren’t grand acts of support, but they but they still mattered🥰
That’s when it clicked:
Insight 2:
Ideation
Where to integrate new gentle support features?
We didn’t want to create a heavy wellness “system.” So, I was thinking about helping our users when they felt down, just like my coworkers supported me!
New features could be linked to the Emotion Tracking:
But first, we needed a better way to record users' feelings more accurately. Before we had:
So, we upgraded the emotion tracking experience and added our support system to the flow:
Ideation
Wireframes
So let me introduce our ideas with wireframes:
Here's how it looked like:
More Research?
New Challenge on Our Way
We didn't know how to create an emotionally intelligent and empathetic AI bot 😰
To figure this out, I read lots of articles and guidelines on developing an AI bot. Based on my research, I found that I needed to think about the bot's personality, response tone and style. So, I analyzed other existing chatbots, including: Wysa, Moodee, Ada, and Youper.
Ideation
AI mentor personality
🌊 Meet Jia — your wise and gentle guide inspired by the flowing river.
Based on research and competitor analysis insights, we wanted to create a bot that didn't felt too robotic and structured. We wanted to create a warm and gentle guiding experience. That's why I collaborated with our mindfulness mentors, AI experts, and backend teams to develop Jia.
Design
Final Design and Prototype
1.
Intuitive Emotion Tracking
We helped users to pinpoint their feelings using an emotional wheel. This allowed more expressive check-ins and reflected the complexity of their emotional reality.
2.
Anonymous Empathy Stickers
Users could send a sticker with a message to someone else who recorded a similar emotion. They could also receive a sticker in return. This feature provides a safe and uplifting emotional connection, without pressure.
3.
Jia - The AI Mindfulness Mentor
Jia is a gentle, wise, and empathetic mentor. Her conversational style was carefully shaped to be comforting, respectful, and subtly insightful, aligning with user needs.
Review
Post Design Results
Our design team participated in Quality Assurance test sessions to test the features across Samsung and iPhone devices. After reporting all the bugs and updating our designs, we worked with the development team to fine-tune interactions and smooth transitions.
As a result, we:
Launched on Apple and Google Play Store
Reflection
Conclusion
Sometimes, the most meaningful experiences come from small gestures of kindness—getting an advice from someone wise, a moment of reflection, or a sticker that simply says, “You’re not alone.”
It was my first experience working at a Korean company! I'm so grateful for being able to design such an important app and its features! This project taught me emotional UX, where I learned a lot about designing for mindfulness and mental well-being. We ensured that every touchpoint was intentional, thoughtful, and rooted in what users really needed: to feel seen, safely.
To my design teammates and app developers:
Thank You! 💖
Thank you for your trust, your openness, kindness - and teaching me everything you know! Every shared idea, field trip, coffee break, and even small snacks from you shaped this app into something more human and real.
Together, we created a safe space where every user could feel seen and supported. That, to me, is the magic of good design✨
The End