Zensi is a personal project that reflects my passion for designing with purpose—specifically in health tech, mental wellness, and social impact. I created it to explore how thoughtful design can support emotional well-being and offer calm, personalized care through technology. This project represents my interest in working with organizations and initiatives that aim to create meaningful change in people’s lives.
Project Overview
Zensi addresses the mental health crisis affecting young adults. Based in research roughly 47.1% of 18–25‑year-olds experience anxiety and 27.1% suffer from moderate-to-severe depression. Major contributors include financial instability, academic/work stress, and societal pressures. The app offers a personalized space to understand emotions, reduce stigma, and support everyday mental wellness.
User
Young adults (ages 18–25) navigating emotional ups and downs, seeking accessible and personalized ways to manage anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem in their daily lives.
User problem
This group often feels overwhelmed by their emotions but lacks the emotional clarity, safe digital spaces, or consistent tools to understand and manage their mental health. Stigma, structured systems that lack emotional warmth, and generic advice create barriers to sustainable support.
Solution
A supportive emotional wellbeing app that helps young adults identify emotional triggers, track moods, and receive personalized support. Zensi focuses on one mood at a time—starting with anxiety—and provides guided content, emotional journaling, and a supportive space to reflect and regulate.
DISCOVER
47% Anxiety, 27% Depression in Young Adults: Job Insecurity, Social Media & Academic Pressure Take Their Toll.
Findings
Common stressors include job insecurity, academic overload, and constant comparison via social media.
1 in 5 people aged 18–25 report often feeling depressed.
Insight
Mental health needs in this group are often unmet due to stigma and lack of accessible, personalized support.
INTERVIEWS & OBSERVATIONS
Key Insights from 5 Young Adults + 1 Psychologist
Contributing Factors: Constant comparison on social media increases anxiety and
self-doubt, but users struggle to disconnect.
Challenge: Young adults tend to push through burnout or anxiety silently
due to academic, social, or cultural pressure — ignoring early
emotional signals.
Support System: Young adults tend to push through burnout or anxiety silently
due to academic, social, or cultural pressure — ignoring early
emotional signals.
Coping Strategies: Tools like journaling, meditation, or wellness apps are used
but often dropped when stress increases — they lack consistency.
DEFINE
How might we help young adults identify and understand the root causes and triggers of their mental health challenges in a personalized, non-judgmental way?
Problem Statement
Young adults (18–25) often struggle to understand the root causes of their emotional struggles due to lack of personalized tools, low emotional safety, and fragmented support systems. This creates barriers to sustainable mental wellness habits.
Solution Statement
Zensi is a mental wellness app for young adults (18–25) that helps users identify emotional triggers and manage their mental health through personalized, non-judgmental support. With features like mood tracking, emotional check-ins, guided meditations, and reflective tools, Zensi creates a calm, accessible space to reduce emotional overwhelm and build lasting self-care habits—addressing the gap in emotionally safe and personalized support systems for this age group.
IDEATION
Many young adults feel lost when their stress or low mood strikes, unsure what truly triggers their distress. How might we help young adults identify and understand the root causes and triggers of their mental health challenges in a personalized, non-judgmental way?
User Journey Map
This journey follows a young adult from recognizing emotional distress to building long-term habits with a mental health platform. Early stages are marked by confusion, isolation, and overwhelm, especially during the search for solutions. As users move into engagement, they face decision fatigue, unclear value, and too many tools. Success comes when the experience feels safe, personalized, and emotionally validating. Key opportunities include simplifying choices, offering adaptive guidance, and creating a consistent, stigma-free support system.
“Gentle Guidance for Emotional Clarity”
Zensi is a warm, intuitive space designed to help young adults gently navigate their mental health challenges. By blending calming aesthetics (like soft turquoise, lilac, and blue), emotionally safe UI, and relatable visuals of real people and Zen-inspired imagery, Zensi invites users into a space that feels non-judgmental, supportive, and personal.
Rooted in empathy, personalization, and accessibility, the experience supports users as they name what they’re feeling, explore mood-based tools like meditation, and return to emotional balance — all in their own time, on their own terms.
High-Fidelity Screens
The final UI integrates the brand’s 5 core values:
Empathy → Soothing colors, friendly tone, comforting prompts
Empowerment → Mood tracking, progress indicators, affirmations
Personalization → Suggested content based on selected mood
Trust → Minimal, transparent design with soft visual hierarchy
Accessibility → Mobile-first layout, emoji-based input, large CTAs
Moodboard and Values
DEVELOP
User Flow
The task in this user flow is “Select the mood amd watch suggested therapy video”.
Sitemap
This user flow outlines a simple, supportive path for users to receive mood-based therapeutic content. Starting with onboarding, users either log in or register, then check in with their current mood or emotion. If immediate support is needed, they are routed to a call with a specialist. Otherwise, users are guided to a personalized dashboard with therapy resources tailored to their emotional state. From there, they can select their mood—such as anxiety—and explore related options like meditation. The journey ends with a calming, targeted therapy video, making the experience feel intuitive, emotionally attuned, and stigma-free.
Low-fidelity wireframes
High-fidelity wireframes
DELIVER
All participants found the app easy to use, with clear mood buttons and a simple, intuitive flow. They described the experience as supportive and visually calming, with content that helped guide them through anxiety in a reassuring way. However, a few elements could still be refined to better match user expectations.
Scenario: Select the “Anxiety” mood and watch the suggested meditation.
Change #1: Improve visibility of Sign-Up link
33% of users mentioned that the Sign-Up button was too small and easy to overlook. Increasing its size and contrast could enhance visibility during onboarding.
Change #2: Redesign the Emergency button
67% of participants found the red “Emergency” button emotionally triggering and unclear. Some were unsure of its exact purpose and felt anxious about accidentally tapping it. Replacing it with a softer label (e.g., “Urgent Help”) and adding a short tooltip or explanation could reduce fear and improve clarity.
Change #3: Add a navigation cue in the Zensi Space
Users suggested adding a visible arrow or indicator in the Zensi Space screen to access and add more moods—enhancing clarity and exploration of emotional states.
Prototype
Next Steps
Based on the insights gathered from usability testing and user interviews, the next steps for Zensi focus on deepening emotional personalization, expanding accessibility, and enhancing real-time support to better serve the diverse mental health needs of young adults.
Expand Mood Support
Add more emotional states such as “emptiness” or “insecurity” to reflect the diverse mental health challenges users face and improve emotional tracking accuracy.Multilingual Accessibility
Introduce multilingual support beginning with Spanish to make the platform more inclusive and reach a wider range of users.Ongoing User Testing
Continue testing for emotional nuance and accessibility to refine how users experience and navigate emotional support features.Enhance Personalization
Optimize the mood-tracking system to generate more personalized insights based on mood patterns, reflection history, and user interactions.Integrate AI Support
Develop a responsive AI chatbot that offers mood-adaptive content, coping prompts, and guided reflections in real time to support users instantly and empathetically.
Reflections on the Journey
This project reminded me how much impact thoughtful details and careful observation can have when designing for emotional needs. Through user interviews, I gained new perspectives that reshaped my assumptions and helped surface what truly matters to users. Designing Zensi showed me that empathy isn’t just a value; it’s a practice, grounded in attention to nuance, emotional safety, and clarity.
