GUI of Loop Journal
A Prompt A Day Keeps Journaling Always
Loop Journal turns journaling into an interesting Q & A game by providing 365 thought-provoking questions. It takes a couple of minutes to finish an entry a day and the unique design helps you see how you've changed over the years in just one page.
Photo courtesy of Dustin Lee from Unsplash
The Story behind Loop Journal
To our surprise, the most-frequently received feedback from DearDays users was that they loved those tiny journal prompts which helped them start writing down their thoughts and feelings much easier, and they couldn't get enough of only 30 prompts and wanted more.
While taking adding more journal prompts into consideration, I bumped into an interesting journal book Q&A a Day: 5-Year Journal which provided a journal prompt a day and users would answer the same question on the same date year after year to witness their changes. This book is quite popular on Amazon and I read over the reviews to analyze the pros and cons of such a journal book and started thinking about turning it into an app.
Loop Journal is like an experiment which we made to validate the concept of daily prompt journal, so we spend about 1 month designing and developing to see what would happen.
Journal Prompts for Loop Journal
Wireframes of Loop Journal
Concept Development
The user reviews analysis was conducted to gain some insights from Q&A a Day: 5-Year Journal as below:
1. The book is small to be handy to carry around, but hard to hold it open and write in a very small space.
2. The book binding made the book fall apart after only a couple of years.
3. Some prompts such as ""Are you wearing socks??" or "How do you like your eggs for example" are lackluster.
4. No ribblon to be a bookmark
1, 2, 4 can be easily solved when the journal is presented as an app and people can write as many as they want. Even though the book is small to be handy to carry around, when people are away from home, they might forget to bring the book with them but would always remember to bring their smartphones. This is a great advantage for a journaling app.
So we focus on the prompt designs and try to make them inspiring and interesting, and only those prompts which could show the differences by years would be selected into the database.
Color palettes for GUI
GUI Design
The main workflow to get the daily journal done is simple: people launch Loop Journal to read the daily prompt, and they tap the icon to tell their story within two steps. To add some fun to the GUI, we chose several color palettes so people could add a personal touch to their own Loop Journal. Thanks to beautiful palettes of different topics and scenarios Colourlovers provides, we don't have to spend much time generating color palettes by ourselves. Highly recommended!
In addition to color themes, we try to put beautiful photos as the background of prompts, they work well and some even are releated to the prompts and make it more immservie for writing stories. Not able to put this design aside, we set the photo cover as default option and people can turn it off to use color themes.
Media Coverage in China, 251 Likes
Media Coverage in Asia
Sadly Loop Journal was not featured by Apple, but it attracted many media coverage from China and people loved this app so much. Loop Journal ever reached Top 1 Paid Lifestyle app in China, NZ, HK and Taiwan and for the first time we could cover our cost of living expense, this was really exciting!
Being featured by Apple is more like an honor to us because it didn't equal to the huge numbers of downloads, especially for paid apps in Asia.
Major updates for Loop Journal
Major Updates for Loop Journal
1. Replace Habit Chain With The Original Design
In the original version, people can see how many spots they've filled up in this month. To step further, we want to implement the habit chain to enhance the experience and prevent users from breaking the chain.
2. Connect to Loopify
Loop Journal is private and people can feel free to write down what's on their mind. We know some people would need this kind of space to release their stress so decide to keep it. But we are also considering ths possibility of connecting Loop Journal to Loopify so Loop Journal users can read other people's stories on Loop Journal.
Brief Summary
It's very interesting but puzzling to us that Q&A a Day: 5-Year Journal seems to be very popular in western world, people love the book and even gift it to their friends as birthday or christmas presents. However, when we turn the concept into an app and write to pitch to Tech News websites and bloggers in western world, only a few ones would like to introduce this app, and most of our users are still from Asia.
