ROLE
End-to-End
Product Design
COLLABORATORS
Vyoma Thakkar
Ananya Shankar
ORGANISATION
Self Initiated @ Ashoka University
TIMELINE
4 Weeks
The Tension
“I don’t even know what checking in with yourself means. I just scroll Instagram when I’m feeling sad.”
At 1:30am, Gen Z doesn't open a wellness app, they scroll.
Emotional care feels like work: slow, clinical, high-effort. "Checking in with yourself" doesn't even make sense. So care gets skipped exactly when it's needed most.
So What?
This matters because 40% of GenZ says they feel stressed all or most of the time.
They're driving culture, trends, and societal change. What supports them now influences the emotional resilience of the world they'll eventually run. It's a chance to build healthier foundations for an entire generation.
The Behavioural Problem
Emotional care is low-dopamine. Everything else isn't.
Emotional care takes effort & headspace. Wysa, Reflectly, Finch, even the best still ask you to journal, chat, track, complete tasks.
TikTok & Instagram offers instant relief with zero effort. Wellness tools aren't bad. They're just competing against the most frictionless high-dopamine experiences ever designed. It's not a fair fight.
Hypothesis
Playful, non-clinical framing could lower the barrier to consistent emotional processing.
Research & Insights
Approached emotional care from a behaviour lens to understand what Gen Z actually does when overwhelmed.
The Double Diamond method let me treat ambiguity as data.
For a behaviour problem like this, where the failure weren’t only the tools but the moment before someone open them, I needed a framework that held space for divergence before convergence, so I could interrogate the real barrier instead of optimizing around the wrong one.
I ran a survey (n=67) and JTBD interviews (~20) to understand what an “overwhelmed moment” looks like, how Gen Z copes, and why existing wellness tools feel too hard to start.
The failure isn't motivation, it's that the moment users need care most is exactly when they have the least capacity to start it.
The Design Challenge
Make starting emotional care feel easier than scrolling, and deliver a small ‘I feel lighter’ shift in under a minute.
Constraints
These principles set the non-negotiables for how the solution should be designed.
Explorations
Tested three strategic bets: reflection, tracking, and expression, to find which one cleared the effort bottleneck.
We generated 12 HMWs and clustered them into 3 routes: Expression, Processing, and Tracking. One concept per route was prototyped and tested with 32 users.
We bet that playful CBT prompts would make reflection easier. Users still called it "work." Naming feelings felt effortful, exactly the barrier we were trying to remove.
Emoji logs were frictionless, but users said it felt like "just recording." Easy to do, nothing to show for it. Low effort, low payoff.
Wordless expression landed differently. Users could "get it out" without explaining—and only then did optional reflection feel safe. This was the only lane that gave relief without requiring language.
The Lightbulb Moment
The insight clicked: the bottleneck wasn't processing, it was starting. We committed to expression-first, with depth only when users choose it.
Expression-first risks shallowness, so we added optional meaning-making and a library for repeat days.
The Solution
Meet EMOTE, a soft place to land when you're overwhelmed. Start in seconds, feel lighter fast, go deeper only if you want.
Emotional care redesigned for low-capacity moments—a protected loop that makes starting easier than scrolling, and returning easier than starting over.
DESIGN DECISIONS
The Core Model: Every screen serves one loop: Start → Offload → (Optional) Meaning → Save → Return.
Emotional care redesigned for low-capacity moments—a protected loop that makes starting easier than scrolling, and returning easier than starting over.
Instead of turning emotions into stats, the Emotion Garden turns them into a private trail of moments, so progress feels visible & unique to each user.
Basically an "all feelings welcome" sign that shows messy is allowed here.
Users pick how they want to let it out—doodle, photo, or minimal text. Sessions are short, private, and non-performative. The key shift: expression alone counts as success, not a step toward something else.
After offloading, users hit a gentle fork: stop here, or go deeper. Reflection is never assumed—it's offered.
Perspective Lab is EMOTE’s meaning-making layer. When users opt in, EMOTE identifies “stuck” language and asks a couple of simple questions, then hands back a few different ways to see the same moment, like a calm friend offering options and returns 3–4 reframes. Suggestions are framed as options, never judgments, and the user stays in control throughout.
Users save only what helped, a moment, a reframe, a takeaway. On hard days, they can revisit in one tap instead of starting from scratch. It's memory without homework.