Overview
TextDiary is an SMS app designed for people who want to keep a daily journal, but may be too busy to remember to do so. TextDiary sends a friendly prompt (e.g. What exciting things happened today?) at a set time asking the user how their day went, and saves responses. Users are also able to send texts at any other time, allowing them to keep track of small things that happen throughout the day as if they were sharing it with their friends. (Project done in collaboration with Alexandra Cheng)
Key Contributions
- Brainstormed initial idea and validated need by interviewing people interested in journaling.
- Journey mapped and prototyped design, and verified usefulness by performing a Wizard-of-Oz style study on a participant.
- Implemented product with changes from additional feedback. Used Firebase and Flask for backend, Heroku for hosting, and Twilio for SMS functionality.
- Performed an additional semi-long term study on design solution.
Motivation
I had personally kept a journal in the past, but stopped due to lack of time. I wanted a way to motivate myself to write a journal entry everyday.
Design Process
Traditional journals use books, and tech solutions exist but are hard to navigate. SMS suits this application perfectly, as it is easy and quick to use. Texting also gives a sense of intimacy, as if you are texting with a close friend you would share anything with. Additionally, using texts may work better than app notifications, which can be easily dismissed and requires opening an app with multiple steps required before getting to the text entry page.
The initial idea was to send a friendly question prompt to the user at a set time everyday. Often times when writing journal entries, people might not immediately remember what happened during the day, or they might not know what to write. This increases the mental load of writing a journal entry, and hence makes users less likely to keep doing it every day. Therefore, a question prompt would reduce the mental barrier to writing the entry.
After telling our idea to other people, we got some feedback. One feedback after showing people a list of possible questions, was that the user would not appreciate getting a positive question when they had a bad day. Therefore, we decided to add an initial question: "Hi NAME, did you have a good day? (Y/N)" and TextDiary will send a happy or reassuring question. We then mapped out the experience of using TextDiary in a User Journey map.
We prototyped the design and tested it out Wizard of Oz style on a user by copying and pasting messages into SMS and sending it to them via our own phone number. The user was a busy college student who usually studies at night, and liked to receive a journaling prompt at 11:00pm. Hence, we texted them at 11:00pm to simulate the app's real functionality.
Excerpt of the TextDiary prototype. To run the Wizard-of-Oz study, I copy and pasted lines from this document and send them via SMS to the study participant.
We found that the overall design was very valid, and the user said that they would use it. We also got feedback that there needed to be more varieties of questions and increased broadness in the prompts. We took into account these suggestions into our actual implementation of TextDiary, which was created using Python and Flask.