Problem Finding & ResearchThe Happiness Project

The Team - Merry Makers Chung Han: CS Major - User Testing

Interests: football, traveling

Emily Harmell: CS Major - Documentation

Interests: collaborative board games, food,

programming languages, and movies.

The Team (cont') Meg Li: CS Major - Team Manager/DevelopmentInterests: reading, Pinterest, food, web surfing, drawing.

Sheema Nezam-Tehrani: IxD Major - DesignInterests: traveling, hiking, sports, outdoor activities

Original List Ideas/ Concept Map Result

And more...

Prioritization matrix with 8-10 highlighted

Narrowing down to top 4

Top 4 problemsProblem 1: Weather

While good weather improves moods, bad weather has consistently been shown to worsen moods. Weather not only impacts moods directly, it also changes tasks and activities.

Problem 2: Relationships

There are many relationships that can impact your mental health: colleagues, romantic interests, family, and friends.

Top 4 Problems (cont')Problem 3: Money

Mental health is affecting by financial security, income (particularly in regard to income relative to peers), and spending habits.

Problem 4: Physical Health

Manys aspects of physical health seep into mental health, including weight, illness, fitness/ exercise, and sleep habits.

Top Problem - Money

We choose money's effect on mental health and happiness as our main problem because we were all interested in helping people manage and spend their money in ways that most contribute to their overall happiness. We all also agreed that this is a topic that is both significant and wide-reaching, as well as a feasible problem to tackle with a mobile application.

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Analysis of Problem- Significance

Money is tied to happiness in a lot of ways. It can lead to momentary happiness (getting the things you want now), financial security can reduce overall stress, it can also be a means of keeping score or exercising generosity.

Studies show that people in wealthier countries report being happier that people in poorer countries and within countries, people with more money do tend to be happier than those with less. More importantly than absolute wealth relative ranking matters.

For these reasons, there is a large significance to this problem, with nearly the entire population being impacted by this problem area. However, the market size for which our application could help would be the middle class. Focusing on ways to adapt your money management to improve happiness is less of a need for the wealthy, and likely a luxury that the rather poor cannot afford.

Analysis of Problem- StakeholdersTarget users - the middle or upper-middle class

The reason for this is that members of the lower class would likely get little benefit from an application that assists in spending expendable income in ways that facilitate happiness because of the small amount of income that isn't going toward necessities or savings. And the rather wealthy members of the upper class probably don't have the financial worries about money that would make setting these resolutions a priority. So it is members of the middle class who have a limited, but sizable, amount of expendable income who would most benefit from this advice.

Others impacted/interested - business owners, educational organizations

Precedents / Prior Work / Competition

What has been done so far? The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin - in her book, she recommends ways to improve happiness by affecting changes to spending, but just being given the tips is not as useful as a way to set the resolutions and keep track of progress.

Wunderlist is a simple task-management application which allows people to keep their to-do's and tasks under control on a daily basis. While this app offers synchronized task control, it does not provide any suggestions or recommendations in order for users to be happy in relation to their everyday tasks.

Precedents / Prior Work / Competition

Money Tips! is an app that provides money-saving tips. While it makes useful suggestions, Money Tips! does not set up goals for customers and it does not encourage customers to accomplish the goals.

Mint is an application that allows spending and income to be tracked and allows for some goals to be set, but the goal aspect is limited and Mint does not focus specifically on improving mental health and happiness, but rather just keeping track of spending for financial reasons.

Precedents / Prior Work / Competition

Aspire Goals, is an application for a mobile phone that believes that achieving goals is 80% mental and 20% activity. What makes this application unique is it focuses on heavily on what other applications ignore, the mental side. Although, this application does not address the relationship of money and mental health, it is a precedent for applications helping people to achieve their goals and be happy.