Objective
The goal of this stage was to turn my early ideas into a polished, high-fidelity prototype and improve it through testing and iteration. I wanted to move beyond structure and focus on how the app actually feels to use, especially how users interact with journaling and AI-driven reflection.
Another key objective was to make the AI features more visible and meaningful. Instead of just supporting the experience in the background, I wanted AI to actively help users reflect on patterns in their thoughts over time.
AI Usage
I used ChatGPT as my main generative AI tool throughout this process. I used it to help with:
- Writing and refining journal content examples
- Generating realistic user scenarios
- Rewriting UI text to be more clear and natural
- Helping me reflect on and summarize heuristic evaluation feedback
Example Prompts & Outputs
Prompt:
“Write a short journal entry about feeling overwhelmed but ending the day feeling better.”
Output:
“Today felt a bit overwhelming, with a lot on my plate. But by the evening, things started to settle. I took a step back, gave myself time to breathe, and realized I got through more than I thought. Feeling a little lighter now.”
Prompt:
“Write a short reflection summary based on multiple journal entries about stress, growth, and gratitude.”
Output:
“Over time, your entries show a balance between stress and growth. Even during difficult moments, you often return to gratitude and reflection, showing resilience and progress.”
Benefits & Challenges
AI helped me move faster and explore ideas more easily. Instead of spending time writing placeholder content, I could quickly generate meaningful text for journal entries, summaries, and prompts. This made my prototype feel more complete and helped me better test the reflection features. AI also helped simplify language, which made the app feel more natural and easier to understand.
Sometimes the AI responses felt too generic or polished. I had to revise the outputs to better match the tone of my app, which is meant to feel personal and calm. Another challenge was making sure I was still making design decisions myself, rather than relying too heavily on AI suggestions.
Reflection
AI played a supportive role in this stage, especially when generating content for this type of app, but the design decisions were still driven by me. I used AI mainly for content and wording, while I focused on structure, interactions, and overall experience.
This created a clear division of work:
- AI: generating content, rewriting text, supporting ideas
- Me: designing the interface, defining features, making final decisions
Through this process, I learned that AI is most useful when it helps speed up repetitive or creative tasks, but it still needs direction. It doesn’t replace design thinking, it supports it. Overall, AI helped me create a more realistic and engaging prototype, especially for features like AI-generated reflections and mood insights, while I stayed in control of the user experience.