Overview
🖼️ Pocket Studio is a whimsical, creativity-driven app that blends art and storytelling to promote relaxation, mental wellness, and self-expression. At its core is an interactive “infinite zoom” art feature, allowing users to explore layered illustrations while uncovering a narrative. The experience is enriched with diverse storylines, guided meditation practices, and a thoughtfully designed user interface, offering an engaging and calming space for creativity and mindfulness. Going through the seasons with Haru the rabbit starting with spring.
A doodle of a highlighter with the message: "Jump to HiFi Prototype." You can use this button to jump to the video of my HiFi Figma prototype below.
Research Objective:

To identify pain points of other competitors and seek opportunities for improvement for Pocket Studio.

Research: Competitive analysis
🧐 When conducting a competitive analysis, especially for a wellness-focused creative app like Pocket Studio, the goal is to gain insights from similar apps to identify:
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1. What are they doing well?
2. Where do they fall short?
3. Gaps in the market that Pocket Studio can fill?
Insights:

‍From the competitive analysis we found that integrating a versatile light and dark color palette, calming audio features, and interactive elements can enhance user engagement and comfort. These features address common pain points like visual fatigue, lack of relaxation tools, and limited interactivity in similar apps.

Design
After brainstorming and looking at inspiration on Pinterest, we began our initial sketching phase and moved onto low-fidelity wireframes. Take a look at my team 😊 during demonstration day!
Our final design centers on five key pages: Landing, Story, Sticker Popup, Journal Cover, and Journal Page, each intentionally crafted to blend functionality with an engaging, visually appealing user experience.
The Solution:

We developed three new features to address gaps identified in competitor apps and enhance the overall user experience:
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  • Journal Page with a mood slider and wellness prompts to encourage self-reflection.
  • Story Page featuring direct access to immersive infinite zoom art.
  • Sticker Popup window for interactive and collectible elements.
Color + Accessibility
We chose warm tones like yellow and orange to create a cozy, welcoming atmosphere.
Various shades of green were used to evoke a sense of calm and reflect natural environments.
⭐️  The palette ties into the narrative, as the main character, Haru, is often surrounded by nature.

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A snapshot of three suggestions we made to the UInclude team for their application of color: 1. Use only one color per category rather than showing masculine, feminine, and superlative words as separate colors. Show Gender bias as one color only. 2. Remove the green underline for flagging inclusive words. This was confusing in beta testing, and only adds to the cognitive load on the screen. 3. Show the inclusion score wheel as black and white. Adding color here competes with the colors used in highlighting biased words...and thus adds more confusion.
We also suggested the above revisions to the UInclude color strategy:
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• Integrating the 7 new colors into the biased word highlights.
• Removing the green underline that indicates inclusive language (this was confusing according to many beta testers of the tool).
• Revising the Inclusion Score wheel to a black and white design so as not to conflict with the colors used in flagging words in the text editor.
Iteration
The iteration phase introduced infinite zoom art as a central interactive feature. The scene gradually zooms in to reveal new details, guiding the viewer through seasonal changes in Haru’s world. Along the way, stickers can be discovered and collected, creating a relaxing yet engaging experience that ties art exploration to daily mindfulness.

Keep on scrolling to see our final draft...

High Fidelity Prototype
Below are two demonstration videos showing the infinite zoom art as well as the journal page in action!
Want to play around with the prototype on your own? Try it below!
Next Steps: Making Meaningful Change
We plan to expand our story offerings and refine user interactions, such as enhancing the zoom function and adding a story sticker feature. Further backend improvements and user feedback from an initial launch will help us fine-tune the app, making it more engaging and user-friendly.
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