BeyondBreakup Design Sprint
SERVICES
Design Thinking, Concept, Design
Technology
Survey, Design Sprint, Prototype
CLIENT
Hofmann & Heller GbR
Year
2019 – 2020
What was Karlmax’s role in the project?
We guided our client Hofman & Heller GbR through the process of questioning, validating and developing their innovative idea.
Why does the user need the App?
Because heartbreak is all too often underestimated, which can have negative long-term impacts on body and soul. The app offers a help program created by experts for these difficult moments in life.
What can the app do?
BeyondBreakup offers an opportunity to take an intensive look at yourself and your relationship expectations, do something good for yourself and find your way back to satisfaction. For acute suffering, more immediate exercises are available to help the user collect themselves and show a way out of their emotional turmoil. Once this has been achieved, wellbeing can be increased with the help of short exercises known as self-love boosters. The journal invites users to reflect on their own progress and note down any important developments. Useful information surrounding the topic of heartbreak completes the app’s offerings.
The challenge
The agency has the benefit of regularly being confronted with vastly differing topics. But working with such an emotional issue as heartbreak in a work context was a very new and exciting challenge for us. It’s an area where each one of us has gathered our own subjective experience. It takes courage and tolerance to question your everyday psychological knowledge, objectively discuss new approaches and develop an app concept for something as seemingly intangible as feelings.
How did we proceed?
We wanted to understand how most people deal with separations or relationship problems. So we asked them. The results from the survey were very revealing: heartbreak is hard to overcome, and the majority of those asked wanted distraction as well as motivation to start a new chapter after experiencing relationship breakdown. Together with potential users and the project partners, we worked out the requirements of those affected and the methodological expertise of our clients in a design sprint. We analysed, prioritised, dropped or specified ideas. In the process, we tested the rich range of tools for coping with trauma and similar problems for their usability as an app. The aim was to define a platform where people experiencing heartbreak would feel comfortable. The result was an interactive prototype with a sophisticated visual design, tested by users and found to be so good that few adjustments were required before programming began.
Behind the scenes – or: How we were able to implement co-creation.
When dealing with issues that are hard to grasp and to objectively validate, such as emotions, it’s particularly difficult to work conceptually. That’s where the stakeholders came in – we asked them questions and received insightful answers. This co-creation method let us work within a communal creation process. Survey participants, UX and UI team members, developers and project managers, psychologists and prototype testers – everyone contributed to creating the BeyondBreakup mobile app.
