:Daysy | Devpost

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Inspiration

As Human-Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) majors at UW and a part of HuskyAdapt, an RSO that specializes in developing inclusive play technology for people with disabilities. We have become passionate about developing accessible technology and recently learned that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects approximately 1 in 44 children in the United States, according to the (CDC).

When thinking about safety and communication within mental wellness, we wanted to create an app that could improve mental health for underrepresented audiences. With this in mind, we jumped on the idea and immediately began user research!

After performing user research (interview) with a friend that has siblings with autism we started to understand some of the challenges his siblings face on a day-to-day basis. Continuing with secondary research with resources online such as articles and videos, we started to piece together some design challenges we could take on resulting in: How might we help individuals with autism express and communicate their own emotions?

What it does

:Daysy is a journaling app specifically designed to support individuals with autism to encourage self-expression, communication, self-reflection, and emotional regulation. The practice of daily journaling can be beneficial to many individuals with autism because it's an opportunity to practice describing the rationale behind their emotions.

By tracking daily emotions and memories, individuals can learn to share their emotions in an exciting way!

How we built it

We used Figma, FigJam, Procreate, Zoom, and Google Docs to research, ideate, and prototype our project.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was thinking about our target user and how to make designs simple enough so that they could be used by a majority of individuals. One huge consideration we took from our user interview was to "keep it simple." If our users cannot understand or are overwhelmed with the app, they are not going to use it.

Another huge challenge was time, as we had very ambitious ideas, but only have 3 designers to create everything.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of finishing our screens within the 24-hour period as it took a lot of hard work and energy!

Additionally, we are very proud to design for a group of underrepresented individuals. There are many journaling apps that exist but we believe our app is simple, but fun enough to use and can be appealing to our target audience.

What we learned

We learned a lot about user research and about a group of users, we did not know a lot about before. Learning about the challenges individuals with autism face really broadened our perspectives on the world and what it means to communicate with others.

In addition, it is very challenging completing everything for this project in the given time. There are certain strategies and methods of creating this project that could be more efficient.