Reflecting on the Design Process of Affective Health

We describe the design process behind a bio-sensor-based wellness-system, named Affective Health, aimed to help users to get into biofeedback loops as well as find patterns in their bodily reactions over time. By discussing details of the design process, we provide a reflected account of the particular design we arrived at. Three design qualities are used to both generate and evaluate the different design sketches. They are, in short, (1) the design must feel familiar to users, mirroring their experience of themselves, (2) creating designs that leave space for users’ own interpretation of their body data, and (3) that the modalities used in the design does not contradict one-another, but instead harmonize, helping users to make sense of the representation. The final user encounter of the Affective Health system shows that those design qualities were indeed both useful and important to users’ experience of the interaction.