Designing for people who already gave up
happiness initiative sent well-being nudges by email, and hardly anyone replied. our team turned the nudges into an app.
a good programme stuck in an inbox.
happiness initiative is a singapore social enterprise working on well-being with communities, workplaces and schools, with a preventive approach to mental health. their nudges went out as an email subscription. replies were scarce, and there was no way to track follow-through or hear back from subscribers.
this one is personal.
i live with mental illness, so i wanted to make something that helps someone feel a little better, one day at a time. it sent me down a rabbit hole on nudges: modest interventions that steer a choice without removing it.
the first meeting gave us too many directions.
the scope only narrowed once we understood the mechanics of an intervention. that showed us what the app could say to people and what it shouldn't.
the same ideas went into a national programme.
happiness initiative later partnered with mccy to launch well-being circles, a community programme built on reflection and peer support, the same things we'd built into the app.
it got me thinking about what a product does to people over years, and it made research the thing that decides what gets built. these are the pieces that sent me down the nudge rabbit hole.
It looks like an actual, polished app. I'm so impressed!