Lynes is a mobile journaling app which has a powerful rich text formatting feature and is completely cloud-based. It has other features like daily reminders to add entries and a chronological arrangement of notes. The goal was to get users to form the habit of journaling, if not every day, then more frequently than occasionally.
My team had specific goals for Lynes outlined and to achieve these goals or find out if they were plausible, user research was imperative.
Some of our high priority goals were:
With these goals in mind, we designed a survey and asked specific questions from which we discovered that most users added journal entries only occasionally, rather than daily but it was not for lack of want to. Majority of them enjoyed journaling but didn't do it often because they often didn't remember to.
The main challenge was to help users create the habit of journaling every day, with additional features as added incentives to get them to stay journaling.
In order to be completely certain of our user base, research was imperative. However, due to the lockdown and limited movements because of the coronavirus, our research scope was limited. We opted for a survey-based research, where specific questions were asked to gain insight into the mind of the users.
The results of this survey were fascinating, we found that most of our users are women between the ages of 15-25 and that they were eager to journal every day, but often forgot. Information gathered informed us that our users would be grateful for incentives to journal, something as simple as a reminder, or even a memory from a year before, an ability to add tags to journal entries and add pictures and videos. Essentially, our users wanted an app that cared that they put down their thoughts and emotions every day, and it was up to us to build such a product.
