zenith

social wellness mobile app targeting student loneliness at UMD

Zenith is a mobile app that started as a project for a mental health competition, xFoundry, at UMD. We're a team of 10 people where we investigated the mental health space and decided on creating a flutter/dart app with a firebase backend. Out of 5 engineers, I was the frontend specialist where I designed and implemented the UI, user flows, styling, and helped the team focus on user research. Many parts of the app are underdeveloped and untouched by a human but hopefully you can see the differences.

CORE FEATURES

Text-based daily and weekly reflection questions for deepening relationships and, cooperative challenges or quests between friends.

GAMIFICATION

Attempted gamified approach including points system, badges, friend streaks, and mood tracking. We really wanted to create a scaffolding for students to touch grass.

FRIENDS

Classic friends functionality including user profiles, add/remove/pin users, direct messaging, and filtering based on interests. The IOS chat engine is IMMACULATE compared to this hunk but we try...

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DARK MODE

Some color inversion can't hurt.

ONBOARDING

I'm particularly proud of creating this onboarding flow.

COLORS

Taken from TailwindCSS

MOODBOARD

GAMIFICATION EXPLORATION

got to learn alot about the "darker" UX which needs careful balance if we're calling ourselves a mental health app.

TEAM STRUCTURE

Examples of sprint TODO-list, my user research template, and one of our FigJams. Typically worked in one week sprints.

PROBLEM

For college students, depression and anxiety rates rose 20-25% post-pandemic, primarily due to long-term isolation and social media use. Additionally, students commonly feel disconnected when beginning college and during finals seasons. Feeling connection or making friends is done through proximity, intention, consistency, and willingness to open up about problems so that others can support you.

RESULTS

As a team of college students, we all have different priorities that took precedent over this app, such as finals season, internships, and social commitments. We slowly worked on it less and less before it ended and we never saw a finished product with actual users. I firmly believe we could have made this a viable product within a year despite our part-time schedules.

TAKEAWAYS

I learned so many things from this app and working on a team such as the needs of a team, AI agents, students' deepest struggles, AI prototyping, and common features across many different apps. I also gained a community of coders and entrepreneurs which is arguably the whole point.