Creating a compassionate daily check-in experience for a university wellness platform, grounded in trauma-informed design principles and validated through diary studies.
University counseling centers are overwhelmed — wait times for appointments average 3–4 weeks nationally. Digital wellness tools can bridge that gap, but only if students trust them enough to use them honestly. Our challenge was designing a check-in experience that felt warm, private, and genuinely helpful.
We partnered with our university's counseling center to understand the clinical needs and ethical considerations, then designed a student-facing dashboard that balances emotional sensitivity with actionable self-awareness.
Through stakeholder interviews with 4 campus counselors and surveys of 85 students, we identified the core tension: students want mental health support but fear that honest self-reporting could trigger unwanted interventions or feel like homework. Existing wellness apps were described as "clinical," "cold," and "another thing to feel guilty about not doing."
"I stopped using the last app because it felt like filling out a medical form every morning. I'm already stressed — don't add to it."
Primary persona and emotional journey map for daily check-in experience
We ran a diary study with 12 participants who logged their daily mood, energy, and stressors over two weeks using a simple text-based format. This gave us rich, longitudinal data about how students' emotional patterns fluctuate and what moments they're most open to reflection.
Key insight: students were most willing to check in during transitions — between classes, before bed, or during commutes. Morning check-ins had the lowest engagement because mornings were already stressful. This shaped our entire notification and timing strategy.
Sample diary study entries (anonymized)
Check-in timing analysis from diary study
Working with the counseling center, we established four trauma-informed design principles that guided every decision: user control (never mandatory, always skippable), emotional safety (gentle language, no clinical terminology), transparency (clear data privacy messaging on every screen), and strengths-based framing (celebrate consistency, never shame gaps).
Custom component library — warm tones, soft shapes, accessible contrast ratios
The final design features a one-tap mood check-in (expandable to a guided 3-question reflection), a personal wellness timeline that visualizes patterns without judgment, smart timing that suggests check-ins during the student's natural transition moments, and a resource drawer that connects directly to campus support services.
One-tap mood check-in — expandable for deeper reflection
Personal timeline — patterns visualized gently
We tested the prototype with 10 students over 5 days, measuring both usability metrics and emotional response. Using a modified Emotional Metric Outcomes (EMO) scale alongside standard SUS scoring, we captured how the experience felt, not just whether it worked.
Complete check-in flow — from notification to reflection
This project taught me that designing for emotional contexts requires a fundamentally different approach. Every micro-interaction — the color of a button, the wording of a prompt, the timing of a notification — carries emotional weight. Trauma-informed design isn't a constraint; it's a lens that makes everything better.
If continued, I'd explore integration with wearable data (with careful consent design) and conduct a semester-long study to measure impact on counseling center waitlists.