Pot Pal
A new way to record memories and grow. Literally!
Team
she/her
he/him
he/him
she/her
she/her
Problem and Design Overview
Pot Pal colorful pot options and faces!
Traditional journaling is a powerful tool for self-reflection, but it can be difficult to consistently stick with since it requires a lot of thinking, creating resistance and discouraging individuals from regularly reflecting.
With fast-paced and busy schedules, people often find themselves struggling to find time to connect with their emotions and reflect on their thoughts. Taking even a few minutes to sit down and journal can be overwhelming and too much of a commitment, especially when balancing personal responsibilities. This detachment can lead to missed opportunities for reflection, impacting an individual's mental well-being.
Our design, Pot Pal, aims to integrate reflection into our everyday routines. Instead of individuals planning dedicated time for reflection, our solution makes the process easier through simultaneous verbal recording of conversations and caring for a plant. Through conversations about emotions, moments, and thoughts, users can naturally reflect without the burden of setting aside time to write and think out a structured entry. With these conversations recorded in a companion app, users can also revisit memories for future deeper reflections.
Design Walkthrough
Our design focuses on integrating emotional reflection and caring for a plant—a task part of our everyday lives, addressing the challenge of finding dedicated time for reflection. Revolving around a smart plant pot and a companion mobile app, individuals can speak to the plant with these conversations recorded in the app. The pot and app work together to provide users with opportunities for future reflection and immediate emotional processing.
Future Reflection
When users talk with the smart pot, these conversations are recorded and stored for revisiting. Future reflections allow users to look back on past emotions and memories, helping them identify emotional and mental well-being patterns. They can see their journey documented in how they have changed, better understand triggers, or see how certain factors may impact their well-being.
All entries view of the user's recorded conversations, allowing user to revisit memories and reflect on entries. Entries are represented with a unique color, defined by the feelings and emotions associated with that day. Upon clicking on an entry, user can view details of that entry and edit it.
Pot Pal can pull insights from previous conversations to better support you. From a previous entry, running made the user feel better so Pot Pal suggests the user to go on a run.
Process and Debrief Active Emotions
As individuals care for their plants, they can focus on processing and talking about their emotions in real-time. These conversations can provide immediate relief and an outlet for users to express their feelings, helping them avoid suppressing their emotions. By regularly debriefing their active emotions, users can improve their emotional regulation, build resilience and good habits, and be grounded in the present.
In the evening after telling Pot Pal about their dinner plans with Erica, Pot Pal reminds the user to water it. While watering it, the user talks to Pot Pal about how their dinner with Erica was.
Pot Pal updates the existing memory and the user attaches a few attachments onto the entry.
Design Research and Key Insights
Our design research was focused on learning about what made current and previous journalers want to journal and why previous journalers had stopped journaling. We wanted to learn about what pain points there are in currently existing journaling products so that we can better improve the user's experience. By learning about what the users’ want out of journaling, we can better design a product that satisfies their goal.
To conduct our research, we decided on doing 1:1 conversational interviews with our participants. Our participants in this research were people who once journaled but have since stopped, or those who never got into the habit of journaling. Through this type of interview, we were able to conduct a casual conversation with the participants as they share their personal journaling experiences with us. Due to the private nature of journaling, we found that a 1:1 conversational interview was well-suited as it kept our conversation private and we were able to really let the participants lead and share their experiences.
Self-reflection is Difficult
From our design research, one key insight that came up was that people tend to have a hard time rereading what they’ve written. One participant had mentioned that they failed to reflect despite having initially begun journaling with the goal of reflecting. The reason why they disliked it was because they found their own writing difficult and embarrassing to read back on. From this insight, we decided that no matter what modality we have for users to record their entries, we want to synthesize it such that the user will feel more comfortable rereading or relistening to their entry. This resulted in Pot Pal’s listening, recording, and synthesis process before saving it to memory.
Pot Pal displaying synthesized reflections on its screen and talking about it.
Other Modalities
One participant mentioned that they disliked typing into their phone to record their entry. They found that it was difficult to type fast and type everything they wanted down consistently. Another participant mentioned that one of the contributing factors to why they’ve stopped journaling was due to a hand injury. From these participants’ experiences, we began considering speech as one of our recording modalities. In our final design, Pot Pal listens to the user as they speak and records their entry in a companion app. The companion app also allows users to type in entries as an alternative recording modality.
Initial sketches of Pot Pal listening to user and speaking.
Documenting and Reflecting
Participants generally viewed journaling as a way to record memories as well as thoughts to look back on in the future to gain insights from. One participant enjoyed journaling during their study abroad trip to record memories and another wanted to look back on their entries to learn about themselves. From this insight, we wanted our product to allow those kinds of reflections to happen and not just have users share their memories and experiences to never interact with them again. This led us to, at minimum, wanting a way to store and display previous entries. This ended up being our “All Entries” view in our companion app where users can go and view all of their previous entries. At the same time, we also wanted to integrate those memories and experiences more and this led to our idea of making our product be able to recall and retrieve information from entries to better support the user.
Iterative Design and Key Insights
Our iterative design process focused on understanding how we could provide users with more freedom and ensure that our design was easy to navigate. The goal was to refine the smart pot and app’s usability and user autonomy when interacting with them. Our initial paper prototype consisted of a simple paper pot, designed to explore how we could blend a plant with user-spoken input. We included a companion app, but there were many overlooked features we discovered during testing. Through usability testing, we identified areas of improvement, such as the lack of user control and cluttered app design. Participants were hesitant to speak to the plant pot since there wasn’t an existing activation phrase or indicator that they could even speak to it at all. In the app, users felt like their stored memories in a tree format were disorganized and difficult to navigate. There was also a desire to delete and add entries and customize dynamic personalities. Using these insights, we created a digital mockup that allows for more user control and intuitive design.
We prototyped both the pot, as well as the companion app.
Activation Phrase and Visual Speaking Cue
Initially, Pot Pal’s idle state was just its smiling face. Through our usability tests, we realized that Participant 2 was hesitant to talk to the plant. They didn’t know how to engage with it. When they realized that they were supposed to talk to the plant, they weren’t sure what to say to activate the plant.
In response, we decided to implement two changes. On the pot, we added a microphone indicator on the screen to indicate when it is on and off. To complement this, we came up with a term “Hi Pot Pal” so users can turn on the plant through an activation line. In the app, we will teach the user to activate the pot by saying “Hi, Potpal!”
Pot Pal before did not cue users on its activation phrase which was modified to do so in the after.
Recommended Water Amount
Although all of our participants were aware of how to water a plant and that plants needed to be watered, we observed a participant who said that they didn’t know how much to water the plant and that other users may feel the same. There were worries about accidentally drowning the plant or not watering the plant enough, resulting in the plant’s death.
In response to this feedback, we decided to implement a recommended water amount. With in-built water and weight sensors, Pot Pal can detect how much water is added to it, allowing users to safely add water without needing to explicitly know how much.
On its face, the water level rises, until Pot Pal is all watered. Then, it shows the user a “Watering Completed” screen, before going back to Pot Pals face view.
As you water a thirsty Pot Pal, the face of Pot Pal fills up with water until Pot Palreceives enough water.
Allowing User Customization
When participants clicked on the profile icon, we didn’t have a profile screen ready. We realized that we needed to implement a profile screen and think about what key information should be shown here.
Based on this feedback, we implemented a profile screen with information we thought would be helpful to the user and allow further customization to both the app and the pot. In particular, this page will allow people to rename PotPal, add additional PotPals, sync PotPal with their contacts, location, and photos, and increased accessibility options (like showing captions on the pot).
Pot Pal app's profile screen where users can adjust app settings and their Pot Pal's settings when they previously could not.