Regulating emotions has always been challenging.
Project overview & My role
Designing for neurodivergent needs
ITI Technologies is a startup with its mission focused on building daily solutions for and by neurodivergent. In Fall 2024, I worked with them as part of accessibility design class to think of ways using wearables (like Apple Watch) to track users' emotion peaks. As the UX lead, I shaped user research direction and demonstrated prototypes to stakeholders.
Regulating emotions has always been challenging.
About our user
Meltdowns often go unrecognized until it happens.
A meltdown, often triggered by sensory overload, is an intense stress response with some users describe emotional and physical symptoms like having intrusive thoughts, body pain, and an urgent need to withdraw. Moreover, for individuals with autism or ADHD or alexithymia, emotions can feel intense but difficult to name.
While meltdowns have serious bodily reactions, another challenge is catching early signs. As our survey with neurodivergent users shows, users struggle most with identifying and understanding overwhelming signals before they suddenly breakdown.
Problem statement
Current tools lack support to address neurodivergent users’ struggle with recognizing and regulating emotions.
Market analysis
Current market divided in two directions
Feature analysis
Solution direction
How might we tailor personal emotion regulation strategy and detect early signs of meltdowns?
Early Concept Testing
With client's interests in exploring how smart watches can tag and track emotions, we produced storyboards, wireframes, and loFis to conduct testing with target users and collect initial user feedback.
More steps, more friction points
Users expressed interests in the quick tap action but were hesitant about using smart watches especially when they are in meetings and presentations.
Journaling creates incremental loads
Time-based journal creates emotional clutter where sometimes user prefer to have reflections as something optional.
Final solution
Empowering with gestures and cues that matter
Feature 1 - Onboarding
Users shared the difficulty of recognizing emotions in the moment. To reduce friction while still leveraging smart wearables, we we explored tactile, low-tech logging methods, eventually leading up to a bracelet with onboarding flow where users pair simple gestures (like a squeeze) with emotions cues they want to track.
Instead of asking for full emotional detail, we focus on relevant signals shared by user, like “shutdown” or sensitive to noise, making the experience discreet and minimally disruptive to daily life.
Feature 2 - documentation
Final thoughts
What stuck with the team:
an action-oriented user flow
Results
Introduced user flows that streamlined product decisions across mobile and desktop.
QR Onboarding flow adopted by the team and currently under active development.
Takeaways
Maintain an active communication channel with engineers upon any firmware and back end changes that may potentially affect the user experience
Always be prepared to design for multiple scenarios
