Interaction Design

Wildwise

Exposure Therapy and Outdoor Exploration App for Animal Phobias.

Problem

People with animal phobias don’t know where to start with overcoming and managing their phobias.

Exposure therapy, a main form of treatment for phobias, is often too expensive and not covered by insurance. Without easy access to resources it can be hard to know how to overcome an animal phobia.

Roles
UX Design & Research
UI Design
Prototyping in Figma
Timeline
9 Weeks
Team
3 Designers

Solution

A fun way to overcome animal phobias.

An app that makes exposure therapy for animal phobias easy and fun to play, encouraging the player to become more active outdoors.

Community

Provides a place for hikers to share their experiences.

Hikers can share stories, encounters, photos, and tips to help others.

Allows hikers to reflect on their experiences.

Virtual Hikes

Informs hikers of nearby trails and hikes.

Prepares hikers by showing what animals are active and have been reported on the trail

Notification alerts when approaching an animal hotspot area.

Exposure Game

Helps players become more comfortable with specific animals.

Gradually exposes players to the animals over six levels.

Shows players variety within the animal group.

Research

Starting with secondary research, I came across a case study about using augmented reality to treat small animal phobias that had an alarming statistic:

60-80% of phobia sufferers do not seek treatment and 25% of potential patients refuse to participate in exposure therapy after understanding the procedure.

We also learned that exposure therapy is often not covered by insurance and largely inaccessible. Learning this, we set out to create a fun and approachable way for people to overcome their animal phobias.

User Interviews

As a group, we interviewed six people with different types of animal phobias and phobia severities. We learned that that their phobias came from poor past experiences with the animal or from media influence at a young age. We found a shocking theme across all our interviews:

That they felt that they had no way to prepare or anticipate an animal encounter. Feeling that it was often impossible to avoid an encounter or prepare for one.

Competitive Analysis

The competition did not focus on overcoming animal phobias.

Hiking apps do provide some information on animals, but they’re more focused on hiker safety and the hiking experience. Carin is focused on providing precise location information. Alltrails is a community-based hiking app, offering a place for hikers to share their stories, photos and experiences.

The one animal phobia app we were able to find, Phobys, focused on spiders in an AR setting. The app doesn’t have gradual difficulty levels. It does use friendly branding outside of the AR game to make exposing oneself more comfortable.

These apps connect with our goal of focusing on before, during, and after phases of an animal encounter.

User Testing & Iterations

Based on feedback from peers’ user testing and our instructor, we made major improvements over the span of two weeks - with three major improvements:

Switching the Rewards System

Based on peer feedback and ingroup discussion, we decided a streak system would be a better fit.

Coins didn't feel like a strong reward, and streaks are better for tracking habitual progress.

Changing our Info Presentation

We had a lot of areas with a lot of information for each card/item that we needed to highlight.

This need for visual hierarchy helped us in designing our UI and final visual system for the app.

Game Interactions and Feedback

From user testing, we found our game interactions didn't feel gradual enough or very satisfying.

We switched to having items show up one by one to give better feeling of progression through the game's levels.

Final Concept

WildWise: Break Free from Phobias, Embrace the Wild

An app that turns animal phobia exposure therapy into outdoor fun, inspiring users to get active. Covering three stages of animal encounters: before, during, and after.

Exposure Game

6 Distinct Levels: Terms, Sounds, Symbols, Images, Videos, and a Petting minigame.

Figma Prototype

Lessons Learned

What I learned along the way

Exploring different concepts
You can never understand users enough
Remember the user's needs
Iterating fast
get in touch
get in touch
get in touch