About the App
Bailey: Paws and Reflect is a mental health app created to motivate anyone and everyone to experiment with and practice mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness is something that can be very intimidating to begin, especially when there are so many different ways to go about it. My goal was to create a fun way for people to experiment with different methods of mindfulness in order to find what works best for them. I created four categories of mindfulness practices: audio, physical, visual, and creatives.
The audio section would allow for recordings of people leading guided meditations, ASMR, meditation through music and a Spotify connection, and other similar practices. The Spotify connection would partner with Bailey to create an AI playlist so that the individual would have a meditation playlist catered specifically to them. The physical section would include activities like nature walks, yoga, and dancing. The visual section would cover landscapes out a vehicle window, ripples in a pond, and other soothing scenes that allow your mind to focus or wander how you see fit. The creatives section would allow for journaling, coloring, photography and more to push one’s brain to think from a new perspective.
Character Creation
It was important to me that the app invited user participation through exposure to mindfulness techniques rather than deter people who were already skeptical of mindfulness practices. I had just discovered an app called Finch in which you care for a little bird in order to care for yourself, and that ended up serving as a major inspiration for this project. I really connected with the idea of a character motivating you on this journey, or better yet, living it with you. I did some research on what animals connected most closely with the idea of mental health and emotional support, and found a connection to sloths and dogs.
Dogs have been known to match the mental state of their owners and reflect the emotions that their humans are experiencing. I saw the energy of a puppy and the motivation to grow together to be the perfect companion for my project concept. Some research showed Irish wolfhounds, English bulldogs, and Labrador retrievers to be good supporters for mental health.
After I developed sketches, I scanned the images into Adobe Illustrator and used the “image trace” feature to gather a stronger sense of the character. I decided to go with the Labrador Retriever and used the pen tool to trace over the image trace. I created each feature as a different layer and began testing each color of the palette I had chosen with different features of the dog.
Researching color theory and the color schemes of other mental health apps allowed me to find direction for my app. The Manchester Color-Wheel study had participants labeling colors as positive, neutral, or negative, and on this scale, pink, purple, and blue tended to always fall in the neutral or positive realm. I really enjoyed the pairing of these colors and thought that the similarities between them would be visually appealing for the app. Eventually, in an attempt to try to bring my new character to life, I started applying gradients to its different features, and saw that the similarities in color choices had the ability to really give the character dimension. This discovery was what allowed this project to click for me.
From here, I really dove into the illustrations of my new character, which I decided to name Bailey. In accordance with the app, I started slightly shifting Bailey’s features to show different expressions or to exemplify the categories that I had discussed earlier. For the audio section, I knew that I wanted Bailey’s ear to be perked up, and for the guided meditation, I knew that I wanted her to inhale and exhale with the user and the audio. I started here, and with simple adjustments such as moving the gradients on the stomach and closing Bailey’s eyes, I could add the illusion of inhaling and exhaling.
The more that each illustration was developed, the more I wanted to create. I ended up creating a version of Bailey that was representative of a mascot for each category. These mascots would then appear on the homescreen carousel and at the bottom of each category page. I was even able to prototype some animations through Figma components, and create the animation of the pond ripples through Adobe After Effects to match Bailey’s style.
App Features
From exploring apps like Finch and Headspace, I realized that one of my favorite features was the initial check in of how you are feeling when you log on. I knew this was something that I wanted to include and used Figma prototyping to animate the emojis getting larger and revealing the opportunity to journal these emotions.
Chat with Bailey was the main feature that I felt brought this app into the future and set it apart from others on the market. In my mind, Bailey, in this sense, would be an AI assistant that can generate responses and allow conversation to be a little more realistic. For safety and privacy purposes, these conversations would not be saved or stored anywhere, and Bailey’s responses would be somewhat general. The chat feature would provide a face and voice to tie conversation into journaling, hopefully allowing people to develop a sense of comfort.
For navigation through the app, the carousel on the home page is the primary source of browsing options. All of the pages can also be accessed through the hamburger menu, and all of the practice options within each category can be swiped out to return to the main category page.
Conclusion
This project concept is something that I really fell in love with throughout the process of working on it. The biggest challenge I faced with this project was timing, and there is so much more that I want to explore regarding this concept. I would also like to continue to explore the general layout of each page to see if this setup is truly the most successful or if there are other organizations of the information that may work better. This project is something I would really like to further expand and possibly create access to other practices. I’d also really enjoy the ability to create more illustrations and animations of Bailey herself, such as her actually walking in an AR setting through the nature walk feature.