Better Pets

Better Pets is a gamified self-care app focused on helping the user build healthy habits that mental blocks such as depression or executive dysfunction may stand in the way of. This application was designed and created by four students within a span of 5 weeks, including original artwork and intuitive design.

My role within this team was lead designer. As the values the team wanted to convey through this application focus on mental and physical health, the design was created around incentivizing an individual to complete self-care tasks. The main way in which this design concept was implemented was by having the user’s self care actions also take care of their own virtual pet in the application. As these mental blocks can be difficult and disheartening to deal with, we also ensured that the design would never include negative reinforcement so the player will not be penalized for missing tasks. Instead, the design focused on positive reinforcement, allowing the user to gain coins when successfully completing tasks which allow them to buy cute things for their pet, or even buy a new pet!

In addition to the general design, I focused specifically on the UI/UX aspect of the application. The design was focused on providing easy and encouraging layouts so the user can interact easily with the application. To minimize the required cognitive ability of the user, we have divided the space into blocked off segments. The spaces are separated into around 5 different sections, and all mockups keep the segment numbers around 5-7 spaces in accordance with Miller’s law (essentially stating that the average person can focus on 7±2 items at once). This is important to the overall app design as this app is intended to be helpful to players who may have mental health struggles. Following the theory of Miller’s Law helps ensure that the user doesn’t feel overwhelmed with the amount of things to focus on.

You can view my Design Mockups below :)