Overview
Mylo sits at the intersection of emotional wellness and creative expression — a space where most digital products have never thought to go. It's not a mood tracker. It's not a meditation app. It's a companion that meets you where language falls short.
Developed as part of an Advanced Interactive Design course, Mylo grew from a single observation: when people are overwhelmed, they don't reach for a wellness app — they doodle, they scroll, they zone out. What if a product leaned into that instinct instead of fighting it? What if expression itself was the therapy?
The result is a mobile experience where users create a personalized AI companion — named Mylo — and then use drawing, color, and shape to express how they feel. Mylo reflects those expressions back with gentle, non-clinical insights that build emotional literacy over time.
TL; DR
Framer is a design tool that allows you to design websites on a freeform canvas, and then publish them as websites with a single click.
The Problem
Feelings don't always come with words.
Ask someone how they feel and they'll often say "fine" — not because they're fine, but because articulating an emotional state is genuinely hard. Research in affective psychology consistently shows that most people have limited emotional vocabulary, a phenomenon called alexithymia. It doesn't mean they're disconnected; it means they haven't found the right channel yet.
The current landscape of mental wellness apps defaults to the verbal: journaling prompts, mood check-ins, self-assessment surveys. These tools assume that if you can name your feelings, you can process them. But for many users — especially younger adults navigating burnout, anxiety, or creative blocks — that assumption creates friction at the very moment they need least resistance.
The existing solutions also tend to feel clinical. Clean sans-serif fonts, sterile white backgrounds, and language that reads like a therapist's intake form. For a generation that grew up with TikTok and Discord, this aesthetic communicates authority when it should communicate safety.
Problem Statement
People who struggle to verbalize their emotional state are underserved by wellness tools that demand articulation before they offer relief. We need a way to help people process and understand their emotions without forcing them to start with words.
The Opportunity
Creativity as a bridge
Art therapy has decades of clinical support behind it — the act of making something externalizes internal experience and creates the psychological distance needed to examine it. But art therapy exists behind the barrier of professional access, cost, and the intimidation of sitting across from someone with a clipboard.
Simultaneously, AI has become capable enough to recognize patterns in creative expression and surface reflection without judgment. The convergence of these two truths points to something genuinely new: a private, personalized creative space where emotional processing can happen before language is required.
Research & Discovery
Understanding the landscape
Research drew from three overlapping domains: competitive analysis of existing wellness apps, behavioral psychology literature on emotional processing, and principles of art therapy and expressive modalities. Together, they built a picture of what existing tools get wrong — and where the real opening is.
User groups were defined by behavior rather than demographics: students and young adults processing stress and identity, creative individuals who already use making as a coping mechanism, and wellness-curious people who have bounced off existing apps due to their clinical tone.
01
The verbal bottleneck kills entry
Apps that lead with text prompts — "How are you feeling today?" — create immediate friction for users who are emotionally dysregulated. The irony: the people who most need wellness tools are also most likely to abandon them at the first ask for articulation.
02
Color and shape carry emotional charge instinctively
Across art therapy literature and behavioral psychology, people reliably associate colors and forms with emotional states — even cross-culturally. Dark, jagged forms signal distress; soft, rounded, warm tones signal safety. This is a design primitive waiting to be used.
03
Personalization drives emotional attachment
Digital wellness tools with higher retention share a common trait: they feel like they belong to you. A journal you designed. A routine you customized. Users don't engage with tools — they engage with spaces that feel theirs. Character creation is a proven on-ramp.
04
Reflection lands better when it follows expression
In both therapeutic and educational settings, insight is most accessible after externalization — after drawing, talking, or writing — not before. AI-generated reflection positioned after creative input is more likely to resonate than pre-emptive suggestions.
05
Playfulness reduces emotional defensiveness
A non-clinical, visually warm interface lowers the psychological stakes of engagement. Users are more honest in environments that feel safe and low-consequence — more game than medical form. Interface tone is not just aesthetic; it's therapeutic design.
Defining the Experience
Two goals, one experience
The experience needed to serve two masters simultaneously: it had to feel emotionally safe enough to be honest in, and engaging enough to return to. These aren't in tension — they're co-dependent. A space you trust is a space you come back to.
User Goals
Feel genuinely heard
Understand themselves better over time
Express emotions without words first
Experience creativity as relief
Have a companion that feels personal
Product Goals
Minimize entry friction
Connect expression to insight
Build emotional vocabulary gradually
Avoid diagnostic or clinical tone
Information Architecture
A structure that breathes
The architecture of Mylo was deliberately kept shallow. Deep hierarchies create cognitive overhead — every extra tap is a moment of hesitation. For an emotional wellness tool, hesitation is the enemy of honest engagement. Five core areas define the app. Each is accessible from a persistent, minimal navigation layer. Transitions between areas feel continuous rather than compartmentalized — the experience flows rather than switches.
Creative Expression Studio
The primary interaction space: freeform drawing, color, and shape as emotional language.
Onboarding
Creates emotional safety and introduces Mylo's premise without overwhelming new users
Reflection Insights
AI-generated observations, delivered gently, after each creative session.
Create Your Mylo
Personalization module that forms emotional attachment before any reflection begins.
Growth History
A visual archive of past sessions that reveals emotional patterns over time.
The companion creation flow uses a slider-and-tap model that feels more like playing than configuring. Users pick from a set of organic base forms — no sharp edges, nothing that feels "designed" — and then layer in color, eye shape, and personality markers through simple gestures. The deliberate choice to not offer unlimited customization was a tension point in the design process. But constraints produce attachment: when there are too many options, the result feels generic. When options are curated, every choice feels meaningful.
As users make choices, Mylo animates in response — blinking, shifting, expressing — building a parasocial warmth before any reflection has occurred. By the time users enter the studio, they already feel a relationship.
The studio opens to a blank canvas with a minimal tool shelf: brush size, opacity, a color field that starts warm. No instructions. The blank space is an invitation, not a void.
After a session concludes — either by the user choosing to stop, or after a soft time nudge from Mylo — the AI processes the creative output. It doesn't analyze in real time, which would feel intrusive. Instead, there's a brief, atmospheric transition — Mylo "thinking" — before a reflection card appears.
Reflections are structured as three components: an observation about the creative session (color weight, line quality, spatial choices), a gentle question to sit with, and an optional prompt to express more. Every reflection card is dismissible with a single swipe.
Final Solution
A companion that listens differently
Mylo was designed around a simple thesis: emotional wellness tools should meet people where expression begins, not where language already exists.
What makes Mylo different isn't a feature — it's a sequence. Every other wellness app asks you to feel, then describe. Mylo asks you to feel, then make. That inversion matters. It means users arrive at self-awareness through the side door, which is exactly where the door should be for people who find the front entrance too intimidating.
Outcomes & Results
Designing for change
over time
As a conceptual product, Mylo's impact metrics are projected from existing behavioral research and testing observations. But the hypotheses are grounded in real patterns: tools that lower barrier-to-entry see higher retention; expressive activities reduce perceived stress; AI reflection increases self-report of emotional clarity after sessions.
The most significant potential impact isn't in the individual session — it's in the longitudinal relationship. Mylo is designed to become more valuable over time. The growth history feature creates a visual emotional archive that most users have never had access to. Seeing patterns across weeks and months creates a kind of self-knowledge that even regular journaling rarely provides.
01
Translated art therapy principles into a digital experience
02
Built a complete mobile-first product flow
03
Integrated AI thoughtfully within an emotional context
04
Maintained clarity and emotional safety despite technical constraints
Most importantly, MYLO became a proof of concept that AI can be designed to feel human — not transactional.
Improvement
What I’d Improve Next Time
Title
Expand long-term reflection tools
Title
Introduce family plans for shared emotional care
Title
Explore community spaces while preserving core focus
Title
Add mood-based playlists and guided creative prompts
Title
Test retention and emotional impact with longitudinal user studies
Reflection
What this project taught me
Designing for emotional experience is a different discipline than designing for efficiency or clarity. The success metrics shift. A moment of hesitation in front of a blank canvas isn't a UX failure — it might be the most important moment in the entire product. Learning to sit with that required rethinking what "friction" means in this context.
Key Lesson
The hardest thing to design for emotional wellness is restraint. The instinct is to explain, guide, and reassure — to over-design for safety. But the most effective emotional spaces are ones that hold open possibility rather than prescribing what to feel. The design has to trust the user more than it trusts itself.
What I'd Improve
The reflection language system needed more depth. In the current prototype, reflections risk feeling repetitive after extended use. A more sophisticated AI prompt architecture — one that builds emotional vocabulary over sessions and avoids recycling phrasings — is the most important next investment for the product's long-term value.
Tension I'd Revisit
The balance between AI guidance and user autonomy is genuinely unresolved in the current design. Mylo's reflections are currently offered on a fixed post-session cadence — but some users may want more frequent check-ins, while others need longer solitude. Building a user-controlled rhythm into the product would meaningfully improve the sense of personal agency.
What's Next
Voice interaction with Mylo would open the product to users who have motor or visual barriers. Deeper emotional pattern recognition over longer time horizons — not just session-by-session, but month-over-month — could make Mylo a genuinely powerful self-knowledge tool. And a private community creative space — not social media, but a curated, protected gallery — could extend the product into shared emotional experience.