Case Study
Red Book Journey App for iPad
My role: Functional app prototype, concept development, text mapping, flight paths, copy writing, style guide, logo, and central graphics design
Tools: Sketch, Adobe XD, Photoshop
Red Book Journey is an interactive, individualized journaling experience based on The Red Book by psychologist Dr. Carl Jung. It delivers a highly idiosyncratic peek into Jung’s self-induced psychedelic dreams to help individuals get to the root of their unconscious mind and perceive the self beyond the day to day consciousness.
Process
Breaking Down the original text The Red Book and mapping its components
Mapping The Red Book
To understand how the book’s contents flow, we created a connection map and flowpath for the original text.
User Persona and Scenario
The final step before beginning our app design was to create a persona, a potential user for our app, to help guide the concept and design towards a specific user.
Readership Persona
Mark Hughes
Age: 40-45
Occupation: Accountant, Father
Goal: Apply Jung’s experimental psychology to himself, without having to read and understand the whole book.
A busy 9-5 worker and father of two, Mark Hughes, has always had an interest in psychology, but has never had the time to pursue it further. He has some surface-level knowledge of Jung’s ideas, which made him curious about The Red Book in the first place, but he’s unfamiliar with and intimidated by the actual contents of the book. Mark doesn’t have a lot of free time every day, but enjoys using it for personal development. However, because of his limited time, if something is too confusing or challenging, or is context is hard to quickly find, he’s likely to skip over if that section of the book.
Readership Scenario
Mark Hughes is sitting at home, having just got settled for bed, and is looking for something to distract is busy mind. Because he’s interested in doing something a little more involved that reading his Facebook feed, he opens up Red Book Journey and opens his mind.
The Red Book is primarily a source of educational fulfillment. He’s curious about the contents of the book, and so it becomes a source of discovery and instruction.
Wireframes
To begin our app design, I made initial wireframe sketches
Styling
The style guide and logo are critical to the usability and appeal of the app. I adapted a sketch from the original text to design the central graphic of the app (which is called the Journey Map) and the app logo.
Scenario
Finally, before building our app prototype, we planned a potential flightpath for Mark, our imagined persona.
Mark wants to delve into his inner mind in the evening, before bed.
He begins a journey of self-reflection based on The Red Book.
Design Prototype
