Breakfree
Creative Path
I've always been fascinated by human behavior, particularly how people navigate the emotions and challenges of a breakup. While these feelings are a natural part of being human, lingering in them can be unhealthy and draining. Through this project, I aim not to dismiss these emotions but to find effective ways to offer temporary relief and brighten individuals' days.
Breakfree Beginnings
In today's society, while relationships can form through various avenues—from traditional encounters to digital platforms—the responsibility to initiate connections often falls on individuals. Despite numerous ways to spark relationships, there's a notable lack of solutions for addressing the pain and sadness that follow a breakup. To fill this gap, we created a service focused on offering emotional support after the end of a relationship.
Discovering The Need
Navigating breakup obstacles with a lighthearted and humorous approach, this project provides a fun and supportive environment for overcoming the challenges of breakups, offering creative solutions and relatable content to help users move on with a smile.
Importance of Humour & Laughter
Humor and laughter significantly impact our emotions and well-being by promoting the release of endorphins, our body's natural joy chemicals. This contributes to stress alleviation, pain reduction, and the nurturing of an upbeat mental outlook. Infusing humor and laughter into day-to-day life reaps considerable physical, psychological, and cognitive benefits, hence making them essential for maintaining a healthy, balanced lifestyle.
I want to be able to get through my day a little easier so I feel less miserable
Since I lead a busy life, I would appreciate something that doesn't require a lot of my time.
Research Highlights
This user story is about Emily, a 22-year-old processing life post-split. Searching for comfort on the internet, she stumbles upon Breakfree via TikTok. As she explores the platform, she switches between humor and empathy settings, discovering episodes of light-heartedness and emotional connection throughout her journey of heartbreak.
Pivot
Initially, we planned to toggle between a humorous and an empathetic call to action. However, after gathering feedback, we realized focusing solely on humor and positive energy would be more effective. This taught me the value of staying open to feedback and adapting based on what resonates with the audience.
Engaging with Real People
We conducted brief interviews to explore the emotions, mental states, and physical changes people experience post-breakup. Our goal was to study environmental shifts in individuals who had broken up within the last 6 months. We held casual coffee chats with acquaintances aged 20-30, including students, designers, professionals, and bankers, limiting breakup-related questions to 15 minutes to respect their emotional states.
Ecosystem Map
Comprehending Breakfree's stance necessitated an examination of its function within the resource ecosystem for those recovering from breakups. This required gauging its engagement with key players such as organizations, therapists, podcasts, and aid services, while taking into account external elements like policy and governance effects on the assistance environment.
How might we
In our "How Might We" workshop, we invited professionals and colleagues to help conduct a session aimed at identifying the root problems and obstacles people face after the end of a relationship.
Learning outcome
One of the most important tasks was hosting a workshop centered on our project, Breakfree, to help us position ourselves more effectively. Engaging and brainstorming with others in such settings is highly beneficial, as it brings a variety of resolutions to the table.
Working in a time-limited environment fosters skills such as agility, enabling us to achieve small tasks quickly. You learn how to collaborate and organize as a team.
Inspiration & Sketches
The aim for Breakfree was to create an intuitively understandable and easy-to-use interface that's straightforward to navigate. We explored modern design trends to find elements that harmonize with the core identity of our brand. Preliminary sketches were vital in the brainstorming process and depicting the user's emotional journey. These vivacious drawings didn't directly influence the final layout, but acted as an inspiration booster to ensure a memorable experience, impeccably in line with our brand's mission.
Design Explorations
From our workshop insights, we identified key design opportunities that shaped our core features: automatic humor alerts, activity recommendations, and a community feed. Our goal is to develop a mobile service that helps individuals navigate the emotional and physical challenges of a breakup. By offering humor and support, we aim to lighten users' moods, foster recovery, and support both emotional and physical healing..
Final Design
The final Breakfree design offers a supportive, intuitive user experience with clean aesthetics and easy navigation. Key features, like humor alerts and activity recommendations, gently guide users through emotional recovery. We also created marketing tiles showcasing the service’s empathetic approach and the benefits of joining the Breakfree community, forming a cohesive, uplifting environment for healing after a breakup.
