We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer Paula Barcante about their original and creative Mobile App design work. Paula Barcante is an award-winning communication designer, that makes our world a better place with their original mobile app works.
Paula Barcante ("PB") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work Joyster Mobile App. Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
PB : Joyster was created based on my own experience. I was dealing with high anxiety and panic attacks and I was unable to find any good tools or apps that would help me understand my triggers. The principle of the idea is really simple, it's used to help people who suffer from anxiety, depression, or other mental and physical struggles to keep track of how their day to day lives are affecting their symptoms.
PB : My main focus was trying to build a platform that was extremely simple to use, but also effective. Journaling is great, but many people do not have time to sit down and journal every day for 30 minutes. Additionally, journals do not give people an overview of how their activities, foods, or people are affecting them in a graph format.
PB : Joyster just opened up for Beta, so we are still early days! We will be doing a complete ios and android launch in June 2020. We are overwhelmed with the support and interest we have received.
PB : Joyster took me about 7 months to design end-to-end.
PB : I designed it based on my own experience as well as observing people close to me who needed a tool like this as well. Joyster is a very personal project to me and we really hope that it can help many people.
PB : Joyster is owned by myself and my co-founder, Steve Viselli, who developed it.
PB : I was dealing with high anxiety and panic attacks for the first time and I was unable to find any good tools or apps that would help me understand my triggers. I started an excel sheet where I would measure my anxiety, panic, and depression levels against my meals, activities, and interactions each day. At the end of week I would graph all of this to see trends. This was when I had a light-bulb moment. For the first time, I was able to actually see what the causes and triggers of my anxiety were.
PB : Not really. I wanted Joyster to reflect my own work and style as a designer.
PB : The target audience is anyone who suffers from a mental or physical health that would like to keep track of their well-being.
PB : A lot of similar concepts makes the experience a lot more complicated than it should be. Additionally, there aren't any apps (I'm aware of) that uses the same kind of algorithm as we do.
PB : I used mainly Sketch for designing the User Interface and InVision when user testing.
PB : I like to think the most unique aspect of my design are the illustrations. I believe it's important to humanize virtual experiences as much as possible.
PB : I was the only designer on this project.
PB : When I started Joyster, I did an early concept testing using usertesting.com to receive market validation and interaction feedback.
PB : The main challenge was coming up with a brand that felt authentic to me as a designer and had a market fit as well. I went through three different brand ideations before landing on this calm aesthetic.
PB : I received an e-mail from the A'Design Award & Competition inviting me to participate. I wasn't sure what it was at first, but the more I looked into it, the more excited I got.
