Check-In
Through research conducted regarding the statistics of stress in millennials and their current coping mechanisms, a response was delivered in the form of Check-In. This project came to fruition as a mobile application developed through Illustrator and XCode. Check-In acts as a new offering of digitally-oriented journalling tool, utilising recordings of a user’s voice in a constructive manner that allows them to chronicle their management of any given scenario causing them stress.
Early Days
In its conceptual stages, Check-In was initially
designed to utilise text-based entries and categorise them into life sections for the user, such as their relationships or their wealth. From here, they would be able to manage their stress based on the types of entries they lodged, such as levels of stress linked to particular scenarios, and so on.
Through user-testing and further research, the notion of harnessing the power of voice eventually became the foundation of Check-In. This arose from the findings within studies of the power of effective self-talk, such as using phrases as “I’ve got this” when reinforcing to yourself the grasp you have over a challenging situation.
“Talking back to my own anxiety felt incredibly supportive. I didn’t realise how reassuring and powerful my own voice could be”
Quotes such as the one above are what led to Check-In being the most rewarding project I have worked on so far. Five participants took part in the overall process and utilised the application over two sessions. The first session involved them talking to themselves about the biggest stressor in their lives at that point in time; the second session involved listening back to the first, and elaborating on the status of the stressor as well as how it felt hearing their emotions through their voices from the previous session.
All five participants had highly varied stressors and operate within different environments; from working in child protection services, to losing a job during the pandemic, to having not seen their partner for multiple days due to him relapsing from his medication and disappearing. Yet regardless of their differences, based on the results that this application provided as well as the content of their actual recordings and what they were acknowledging out loud, all five of them shared the collective train of thought that due to Check-In they were able to gain a far stronger hold of their stress than what they could’ve without it.
