Design Thinking: how to fix a broken heart
When I was little, I wanted to be an inventor. I wanted to make people’s lives better, so I told my mom I was going to invent some kind of plastic that would cover the windows in my house so she wouldn’t have to clean them ever again. That didn’t work (for whatever reason), but nowadays, my mission as a UX designer is still to make people’s lives better. My only rule when starting a project is to always choose a goal that I can never guess the solution to, because where would be the fun in that?
So when I chose the objective to achieve in my first individual Design Thinking, I chose something that I had experienced many times for myself and that I kept experiencing through my friends; the one thing I have never been able to fix in my personal life: mending a broken heart.
If user experience design is focused on making people’s lives easier, I wanted to fix, in four weeks, the most recurrent and transversal problem humans have. I think my psychologist would’ve thought it was terrible, so I never told her. Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
“Great designers don’t fall in love with their solution. Great designers fall in love with the problem.”
Jared Spool
How to mend people’s hearts?
To deal with the most difficult challenge I had ever encountered, I would use the Design Thinking (aka Double Diamond) methodology, which is based on achieving a deep understanding of the problem before addressing possible solutions.
The first phase of this process required carrying out extensive research, then synthesizing and selecting the most important discoveries regarding the problem. The second phase, the creative phase, consisted of bringing the possible solutions to the ground, and finally, choosing and defining in detail the best of all them.
As this was a complicated challenge, I used a Gantt chart to organize the different phases of my project and the time I wanted to spend on each of them.
So the research phase began.
Phase I: How do people’s hearts break?
The first step in learning about a topic is to stop and think, what exactly do we need to know? A thousand questions about grief arose just by thinking about it a little. That’s why this phase began with a brainstorming session of questions, the so-called research questions, which collected all my doubts and were classified by topic:
Many of these questions were answered using different methods. For some of them, for example, I carried out extensive online research on both the topic of grief (desk research) and on existing tools for dealing with this problem (benchmarking). I highlighted my most important findings…
…and I drew my conclusions:
In order to answer other research questions, I conducted in-depth interviews (specifically designed for each subject, based on their type of grief) as well as double interviews (which were particularly interesting, because sharing experiences made the participants open up much more). I also designed a survey (which was answered by over 100 users in the small window of days available), collected the user diary of a young woman going through a difficult breakup, and analysed online user opinions using netnography.
From all this, I drew several important conclusions:
- There are many more victims of psychological abuse than it seems, and all of them suffer long-term consequences.
- Grief over a death seems to be the most devastating kind, but it’s also the one that holds the least opportunity for relief. You just learn to live with it.
- People need outside help to overcome a broken heart from a relationship or friendship, especially if they’ve been toxic ties.
- A bad relationship leaves visible symptoms such as memory loss, lack of self-esteem, low self-confidence or fear of recommitment.
- Although there are apps that seek to inspire positivity, users need to feel the pain and grief to overcome the situation.
- The best tool to overcome grief of any kind is therapy, but not everyone is emotionally ready or can afford a psychologist.
- Grief from toxic relationships is more complicated than grief from healthy relationships.
- 98% of survey respondents have had their hearts broken. A third of the people said it was because of a toxic relationship, and 12% said they didn’t know if it was. Despite everything, 98% believe it was worth the risk.
- Each person handles grief in a different way. Most people talk or write, others block themselves and let time pass. Many find it helpful to keep themselves busy. Many others recommend therapy.
After drawing all these conclusions, it was time to summarise.
In doing so, I could not stop thinking about that quote in which Frida Kahlo spoke about her husband, as if suffering for him had always been an inevitable fate for her.
Phase II: What is a broken heart?
This first week and a half of the project had yielded a lot of information, but it was impossible to use it all. So, with all that was learned in mind, the second phase of the project began, focused on discovering which parts of the research were key in developing a solution.
First, I laid out all the concepts of the problem: Who has it, what it consists of, when and where it occurs, why it happens, and what are the circumstances surrounding it.
User persona
Then, I designed a user persona, that is, a fictional character that would group the users’ most prominent goals, motivations and frustrations, based on what we had discovered about them in the research phase. I decided to focus on toxic relationships, since they carried the most complex consequences. This is how Amelia Caballero was born:
User journey
Following the synthesis work, using Amelia’s perspective, I put myself in the shoes of the user suffering from a broken heart (in this case, a toxic relationship with its ups, downs and all its consequences) and going through all its phases, in order to discover at what moments a tool was most necessary:
The synthesis was done. Now it was time to get down to work.
Only, it wasn’t that simple.
Phase III: In search of a solution
At this point, a reflection pause was necessary. Understanding the points of view and empathizing with all these people, who spoke to me so openly about the things that hurt them the most, was not easy.
For a couple of days, I experienced a small block and, to get my mind off of things, turned on one of my favorite series: The Haunting of Bly Manor by Mike Flanagan. Right at the beginning of the series, one of the main characters says something that made me think: “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.”
It reminded me of a poem by my favorite writer, Richard Siken, that goes, “Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story”. He’s right; every love story ends in loss, one way or another, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worthwhile. We all know how it ends, and yet we still seek connecting with other humans.
And, in my case, by looking for solutions. That’s how my block ended.
I analyzed the most important pain points and, unable to choose one above all, I focused on three of them. That’s how Lighter was born.
To clearly define the three functionalities, I developed the information architecture of the app, trying to address in each section the palpable consequences of a broken heart regarding the user’s present, past and future:
I also carried out a Business Model Canva, as well as a value proposition to evaluate the real effectiveness of the chosen functionalities:
So, Lighter is an app designed to help people who have been through a toxic relationship, or even a case of psychological abuse. It is made up of three features:
- The Lighter: a test that detects irrational thoughts, which helps to stop them and find contact with reality.
- Safe Space: an anonymous forum, moderated by psychologists.
- The back-on-tracker: the tool to relocate the future, which ensures the user works every day on the four pillars of well-being (social, emotional, mental and physical).
It was a functional, detailed tool that focused on some of the most important pain points. That had to be the solution, right? But something was off. The irrational thought detector and the back-on-tracker were useful tools, but cold, when the user needed warmth. The safe space might not be a safe space; every experience is unique and we can’t always help each other.
And then, it hit me. I was missing one piece, the most important one, a piece that had been with me, on this project, from the beginning, helping me process what was affecting me, helping me understand it and use it.
Art.
I realized art is the most powerful tool we have to feel that we are not alone in the world. And we should use it.
Both the irrational thought detector, the back-on-tracker and the safe space come up against a very important obstacle: each person faces grief in a different way. So, we needed a tool that could string along with each person in the way they needed.
Thus, The Lighter is reborn: a search engine that allows users to find all kinds of artistic content that accompanies them in their grief and allows them to connect through it.
Phase IV: Creating The Lighter
First, I designed some low fidelity wireframes to get an idea of how I wanted to structure the content. Second, I looked for color palettes that fit the peace I wanted to convey. And finally, I designed the high fidelity wireframes.
The art search engine that walks with you
Throughout the process of research, synthesis, creation and the final conceptual twist it had taken, The Lighter had been slowly transforming into a very simple idea: we need help during grief. A broken heart is not fixed, it is healed. And the best tool is the company of other people who have already gone through that grief, who know how we are feeling. That is why users need to find artistic content that shows griefs like theirs.
The idea: the app will make you a recommendation of the week, completely at random, as well as a suggestion based on the tastes of other users. It also allows you to get your own personalized recommendation by answering a few quick questions.
In addition, The Lighter offers a search engine that allows you to find any content (music, books, series, films, etc.) through a series of filters: type of grief, people and relationships involved, feelings you want to evoke…
Each piece of content, in addition to having all its corresponding data, is classified by labels, so that people can avoid things they may not be able to face yet. And, of course, The Lighter will have a community of users who recommend their favorite content.
This way, users will be accompanied by content that is always accessible and addresses all types of grief (romantic, family, friendship, death, etc.). Obviously, The Lighter can never replace therapy offered by a professional, but it can make the journey much lighter and less lonely.
Testing
After designing the prototype, I carried out some testing (mainly conceptual testing) of the app, to see if users would find it useful. The responses were really positive:
Conclusion
The conclusion of this Design Thinking was very optimistic. Users say they would use the app. The Lighter is useful and accessible, and it solves a very common problem that currently has limited and not always accessible tools, such as therapy, or unemotional and uncreative ones, such as positive thinking apps.
In the end, I have not been able to solve the problem; I have assumed that there is no way to fix a broken heart. But we can keep putting band-aids on until time and art make it heal.
