Journalyze
Designing a convenient tool for self reflection using speech to text technology.
Project Description
Honest self-reflection is a difficult but rewarding exercise. One popular and effective method of self-reflection and personal development is journaling.
Turns out writing down your thoughts and feelings on a regular basis teaches you a lot about yourself.
The problem is, it’s hard to keep it up. Not everybody is willing or able to take the time to write journal entries every day.
In our sixth semester at HfG Gmünd, my teampartner Nico Brand and I started to think about ways in which journaling could be made approachable for a greater number of people.
So, we designed and prototyped Journalyze, an application allowing users to record journal entries verbally and reflect upon them in text form.
MY ROLE
UX Research
UX/UI Design
Prototyping
CONTEXT
Self-Initiated, Invention Design project at HfG Gmünd
DATE
Winter Semeste 2017
TEAM PARTNER
Nico Brand
The process.
Research
In an invention design project is based on the assumption that a technology exists or will exist within a given timeframe.
Regardless we first made sure our assumptions about the capabilities of speech to text transcription and text analysis were well founded.
Thus, we researched and tested a variety of text to speech and Natural language processing APIs to see what they could do already and how well they did it.
Then, we asked potential users to speak about their day much like they would when recording a journal entry with journalize.
We transcribed and analyzed their journal entries, presented them with a info graphic of their results and conducted user interviews to gain insight about their wants, needs, thoughts and feelings in response to this experience.
Design
Based on our findings we designed and prototyped an interface for journalize.
The goal was to make the application as convenient and easy to use as possible, while also conveying a sense of credibility and inspire trust.
The product was also designed to offer different layers of debth when engaging with journal entries.
They also could go through their entry word for word or use a variety of search and filter options to find whatever they deem insightful themselves.
The result.
Summary
Journalize makes keeping a journal and gaining profound insights about oneself easy and convenient.
In essence it has three components. Recording and Transcription, Search and Discovery and lastly Manifestation.
Recording and Transcription
Journal entries recorded with Journalize are automatically transcribed.
The resulting text is automatically analyzed and formatted to be as comfortable to read and engage with as spoken word can be.
Search and Discovery
Journalize finds sections and paragraphs that might be useful to reflect upon and allows users to filter and search through their journal entries comfortably.
Manifestation
Whenever something useful, interesting or profound is discovered it can be saved as a note or quote so that valuable insight is never lost.
What I've learned.
Early concept evaluation saves time down the road
In this project we tested our concept by manually analyzing and curating transcripts first and handing them out as sheets of paper.
The resulting insight turned out to be invaluable while designing the application and we were glad we did it before making more elaborate prototypes.
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