The Tranquility App
The app for relieving long term stress in college students.
Introduction & Motivation
Hello, we want to introduce you to our latest new app called Tranquility! This is a mobile and web application that helps students reduce stress by better managing their activities and recording how their day went. The reason why we created this app is that we did research and saw that college students often experience a great amount of stress in school due to large workloads and strenuous schedules. This often results in students being mentally exhausted or stressed out, so we wanted to create an app that would help students better organize their tasks and reminders for important deadlines, record their feelings and reflect on past audio recordings, and answer surveys to track their mood.
Related Work & Competitive Analysis
After our research we found a few apps that were similar to ours:
- Remente: focuses on self-improvement and well being
- Mypossibleself: allows users to describe their mood and has health techniques that can improve users health
- Breathe2relax: geared towards people with PTSD, teaches a breathing technique to help with stress
- Reflectly: uses AI to help with mood levels
Our app differentiates from our competitors in that it centered more on college students, allows for customization, has a web version and has constant software updates to fix bugs (an issue that our competitors have).
Design Problem & Targeted User Group
Our target user group is college students who need help managing their long-term stress. Large workloads, strenuous schedules, and isolation can all contribute to stress in students, leading to common feelings of mental exhaustion, busyness, frustration, and anxiety, according to our research. Students may not have the time to consistently decompress and focus on their own long-term stress management, which could lead to mental health issues like chronic stress, anxiety, and depression.
Key Design Requirements & Design Rationale
For the basis of our app design we knew we wanted to have several main features. One feature being that users could log in and choose how high or low they feel at a particular time. We wanted a way for students to document their days and a platform for students to outline their feelings in some capacity. Along with this we added a feature to allow users to reflect on their days by recording audio or text recordings. These features would allow students to document how they’ve been feeling over a period of time and promote their mental awareness as well as lower their stress by identifying what parts of the day or week they feel the lowest.
A design requirement we wanted to also focus on was how these features would be organized. We chose to have our calendar feature and specific recordings be color coded. This was to make sure users could easily pick up on their mood patterns.
After receiving feedback from other students about our group design some adjustments were added. We made sure to include a settings feature where users could personalize the colors for their mood, since students mentioned not everyone may associate a color with the same mood.
Final Version of the Prototype
Future Work
There is definitely a lot of future work that can be implemented into this app before it can become fully functional. To start, we could try to implement some type of feature that would encourage people to use the app on a daily basis. One addition could be allowing other apps to connect to our app such as google calendar to fill in the schedule automatically instead of having to fill it in manually. Another way that we could incentivize people to use our app everyday is by offering points that could be accumulated by doing activities in the app that can be used to redeem rewards. An example of this could be if the student who uses the app does a daily recording they would receive points for each recording and when they reach a certain number of points it could be used to redeem a reward like a coupon to a restaurant on campus. Another change to the app itself could be adding a sleep tracking feature to the app. Many college students do not have a regular sleep schedule and this could be a way to help college students view data on how they have been sleeping lately so they can fix their sleep schedule. We could also help students understand how to use the app and what it is for by using an introduction section when they first download the app to give them an overview of the app. This overview could go into what the mission of the app is, what features are included, how to use them and how these features could help with the long term stress that college students deal with. Another thing that could be added to the app in the future is allowing the student to choose an option that would have the app read their text diary entries out loud so that they can listen to it back instead of just reading it. This would be great for students who have other priorities but would like to listen to their diary at the same time. Some future work for after the app is complete is making sure that it is available on all platforms and making sure that the app is advertised to allow any students that want the app to be able to download it.
Conclusion
Overall, college students would benefit greatly from using the Tranquility App. They would be able to mitigate their stress levels, view their previous moods, reflect on their past audio recordings, and be more organized with their schedules. With the use of our app, college students’ long term stress would be greatly reduced.
