Wellness App
Prototype made for the Canada Revenue Agency
During my time at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), my team explored the idea of creating an internal app designed to encourage employees to take regular breaks and support their mental well-being during the global pandemic. Unlike many of our other projects, this concept was not formally requested by the CRA; instead, it originated as a personal initiative developed by my manager and myself in response to the challenges employees were facing while working remotely. Many employees were experiencing burnout, isolation, and decreased motivation, and we wanted to explore how design could help promote healthier daily habits.
The goal of the project was to conceptualize and design a prototype for an app that encouraged mindfulness, balance, and self-care in a simple, accessible way. I was responsible for leading the design of the initial prototype and began by focusing on activities that could be easily integrated into a workday. Early concepts included guided breathing exercises to help employees reset during short breaks, as well as a journaling feature that allowed users to reflect, decompress, or track their thoughts privately.
Initially, most of the work for this project was completed in my spare time,. However, as the project developed, it attracted interest from various other groups within the CRA. In response, my manager decided to formally pitch the concept to explore the possibility of further development. To help with the expansion of this project, another designer from our team began helping me with the layouts and designs, and together we expanded the scope of the app. We designed additional screens and features, and redesigned a new version of the app to include a customizable goal checklist that allowed employees to set and track personal or professional goals, reinforcing a sense of progress and accomplishment.
Although the project was ultimately not selected for full scale development, it was a valuable learning experience. Through this work, I gained hands-on experience designing calming, supportive user interfaces, incorporating user feedback to refine the experience, and collaborating closely with other designers to strengthen and improve designs. The project also reinforced the importance of empathy-driven design, particularly when creating tools intended to support mental well-being. While it never reached completion, this remains one of my favourite projects, and I am grateful for the opportunity to explore a more human-centered approach to workplace design.
The initial concept started by creating designs for a meditation exercise.
This design did not have any guidelines so I decided to make it simple and calming.
The next part was the idea of designing a Action plan activity. This would be a activity for participants to write personal goals to help them practice healthy habits.
The Action plan was a bit too vague so to tie it back to mindfulness was to make it a action plan for a personal mindfulness journey. This would be a activity for participants to write personal goals to help them practice healthy habits.
The only guidlines given were to design a platform to write personal goals that are not meant to be overbearing or stressful.
To make the Mindfulness Journey and Action Plan more finalized to for presentations, my coworker Michelle Yu created a tutorial of how to use these tools. Using my exsisting screens and assets, she made step by step explanation how to create a goal, how to use each feature and added tabs to create descriptions or make a checklist for each goal.
After some review and feedback sessions for the first set of designs , we thought to redesign it in a new format that was a more cohesive. This layout would have a journaling system, goal setting, action plans and affirmations to encourage users with every goal they set.
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Here is the home screen for this new version. I designed the milestones, descriptions, action plan and affirmation buttons while my coworker designed the milestone reminder and page layout.
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The Milestones is a self-driven space for employees to set and establish their larger goals in and outside of work. To help with motivation, participants could set their own reminders.
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Descriptions, allowing employees to deeply understand the importance of each Milestone and the personal motivations driving them to work towards it
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Action plans, outlining the steps and tasks required to achieve their larger goal. Upon the compleation of each task, the users are rewarded with Kudos to customize their app profile
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the Affirmation section, providing users with a means of self-encouragement through personal quotes and rewards, as well as access to inspirational quotes from other sources.
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I collaborated very closely with my coworker Michelle for the designs and layouts of each screen. Michelle designed the navigation bar at the bottom of the screens, chose the colour scheme, fonts and title bars at the top of each screen. I designed the layouts of the action plan, affirmations and descriptions page while Michelle and I worked on the milestones pages together.
Process work:
