Cactus | Portfolio of Katie Blackman

Katie Blackman

A minute of mindfulness in a daily app

May 2019 • View Site • View App

Cactus is a daily journal to help people boost their self-awareness and discover what brings them happiness. When users journal their thoughts, Cactus gives them personalized insights.

Mission

Our mission is to make a daily habit out of self-care that feels easy, yet worthwhile and valuable enough to do every day. Our hope is that this daily practice starts to light up your life in ways that are meaningful to you.

My role

Our startup has just four people (the founders). I focus on product, ux, design, illustrations, micro-copy, development, and interactions. All of us contribute however we can; we never work alone on anything.

Users

Cactus targets young professionals who feel like they don't have time for themselves. These are the folks who know gratitude is beneficial, they've read that self-care is important, yet they haven't had success in creating a daily habit of it.

Early on

Cactus began as a plaintext email, sent to 50 of our friends and family every day. At the time, the only way for users to look back on their reflections was to filter their inbox or wherever they were keeping their daily reflections. (I kept mine in Google Keep.) This wasn’t very inspiring. Our users started asking, "Who's reading my emails?" and "How secure is this?" Reflecting on those questions, we created these goals:

Create a way to capture new emails (users) so that we can grow
Capture reflections securely for each day's prompt and make users feel secure
Have a place to look back at reflections so that users see the value they're getting
And...create a brand

An example of one of our early emails.

A storyboard of our early user story.

"The Cactus team is one of the best founding product teams I've ever seen and I've seen thousands of them. Their product and product vision around mindfulness is spot on [in a] a rapidly growing market...They listen, they learn, they decide and they iterate."

— Kirk Holland

Brand

Scope

The goal of the Cactus brand was to create something that we could all identify with. I wanted to include everyone’s feedback (as much as I could) so that we could all own and love working with it.

For this project, we wanted to end up with a logo, a color palette, and a personality for marketing purposes.

Using Gibson Biddle’s framework from his work on the Netflix brand, we went through three exercises as a team:

Positioning Model: What is it? What are the customer benefits? What is its personality?
Branding Pyramid: Something bigger—the bold 10-year vision; emotional benefits—how you'll be remembered
Concept Summary: Take previous work and put it into a paragraph written for a 6th grader.

My Contributions

I led the team through each branding exercise, which helped us fill a Google Doc with ideas and notes.

I then got to work on the logo, sketching and using rectangles to see how little I needed to create the cactus shape. In my mind, the best logos are quite simple. I did some initial research on cacti to make sure I had its parts correct. I used Google Images and Unsplash for cacti inspiration, and Picular for color inspiration.

I created a few logo concepts for the first round and shared with the team. Taking their feedback, I created another round of logos, showing the team what worked and what didn’t.

In just two days total we had a logo, an idea of what and who Cactus was, what benefits a user would get, and how to pitch Cactus to anyone.

You can read even more details about my process on Medium.

Web

Sketches & collaboration

Because we are a remote team, our whiteboard sessions are a little different. If we want to do a group brainstorm, we sketch on our own, then share photos of our sketches with each other while we're all on a group call. We take turns explaining our thinking, then I'm able to consolidate the strongest ideas into new sketches or wireframes.

We are constantly collaborating over Slack and Hangouts when needed. We never hesitate to jump on the phone if a conversation over Slack has gone on long enough.

Design

After doing the brand exercises, design came much quicker. I went from sketches to mocks easily. We used illustrations from undraw.co: free, fast, and playful-looking, which is what we were after.

For the goal of capturing the daily reflection, I had a couple different ideas at least for wider screens. We could either (1) go with a stream of Q&A. Or we could (2) go the route of an inbox, where you can easily bounce around questions and see what you previously reflected.

I gathered the team, presented my wireframes and we all decided the stream felt better, because it was cleaner to look at. And, the further we could get away from the slog of an email inbox, the better.

Outcome

Our users immediately started adopting the journal as their primary way to reflect. So we pushed forward.

Sketches of the first homepage iteration.

Wireframe exploration for the journal on desktop.

The growth of the journal.

Growth

iOS

We started to hear from prospective users, "I couldn't find you on the app store" or "Let me know when your app is ready." We knew we would eventually build an iOS app. If we wanted to grow, now seemed like a good time to do so.

Virality

While our CTO, Neil, was working on the app, Scott, our Head of Product, and I teamed up on a couple features to help build virality:

Sharing: We made sharing journal notes a step in the daily flow, so that it would feel more natural to share what you wrote.
Trading: We did some iterations on trading notes, where users could read each other's notes only after both had been shared.
Friends: We launched friends + an activity feed that showed when your friends reflected to give users the feeling that they have a community at Cactus.

Though each of these experiments were used by our members, none of the features really moved the needle. Users weren't comfortable sharing their personal journal entries with others.

Product Hunt

Though our virality tests didn't pan out, appearing on Product Hunt did. Cactus became the #1 product of the day in October 2019 beating out Twitter for Mac. This resulted in huge growth for us.

Dark mode on iOS

Once we launched our iOS app, we kept going. We did a few bug fixes, and then we were ready to figure out dark mode, which was gaining traction since it was announced at the Apple Keynote earlier in the year. Neither Neil or I had experience here, but as with most things, we felt pretty confident we could figure it out.

I did some research about best practices, and checked with Apple, Google, and my favorite designers. Implementing the design was actually much easier than expected and I was happy to jump into Xcode to assist Neil.

After it launched, some of our users preferred it over the original theme.

"What can I say? This app got me back into mindfulness. I used to just use Day One here and there, but having a daily prompt (based in science) really compels me to make this part of my health..."

— iOS app review

Illustrations

The next thing we wanted to tackle was looping back to the design. When we launched, we grabbed illustrations off undraw.co for free. We didn't realize how much these would become apart of our daily product. Every prompt, every day, had an illustration.

The problem was, they were becoming more widespread, used on several websites all over the place. We even heard from users about them. They were great as a first attempt at contributing to our playful brand. However, they weren't unique to Cactus, and every other part of Cactus was unique. We were hungry for that feeling of authenticity in our illustrations too.

So we spoke with a few illustrators whose work we had been admiring. And we would have loved to bring any one of them on, but it just wasn't in the budget. So I took a stab at it. What resulted was the start of a large family of blobs.

Homepage dashboard

We wanted to increase the awareness of the value someone gets with Cactus, and we felt that showing their progress over time would help with that. At the time, the only way to see your stats was after going through the daily prompt. These stats included common words in their reflections, total number of reflections, total duration of reflecting, and current streak, but we were quickly creating even more insights. Our goal was to make all of these insights more accessible.

Design

After understanding exactly what we wanted to do, I started sketching ideas of how and where we could showcase a user’s progress.

We came together and decided switching the homepage from the journal to a dashboard of insights would certainly increase visibility, and possibly push basic users into the premium tier.

Development + Challenges

After I created the mocks, we started developing components piece by piece, which allowed us to release insights separately and see their impact.

The most challenging part of this project, was fitting the components together into a responsive layout as we released chunks. Not only did it have to fit together at all sizes, but we also had to consider if a user saw an empty state, an upsell, or a chart depending on their status. I redesigned this page multiple times so that the emphasis would stay on the most important component at the time.

What started as a journal, slowly became a window into how a user was progressing toward being a more positive and mindful person. The release of the dashboard increased both revenue and engagement, and ultimately changed our product.

Small feature, big impact

Users go through a prompt each day on Cactus. They’re asked a simple question like, “What are you looking forward to this week?” After they’ve journaled some thoughts, our IBM Watson Emotion Analysis tool analyzes the words and shows the user how positive their reflection is and what emotions are detected.

This proved to be a great tool to give users insights on how their inner talk can affect their wellbeing. The complication was that users often would write one sentence, which wasn't enough words for the tool to give them feedback. So on the first iteration, many users were seeing the message, “Not enough words to analyze this time. Try writing more…”

There was no way to change the capability of the tool, so we decided to implement a progress “donut” that would fill to a max of 75% as they typed in words. And once they wrote just a few words more than one sentence, it would be enough for the analysis to work.

This tiny UI treatment proved to have such a big impact. The number of average words journaled by our users went up, which increased the perceived value. To users, it feels more impactful to get insights into their emotions.

"In my years working with Katie, she has been incredibly adaptable to the changes that the organization has thrown our way, always finding a way to add value to the team, even when most everyone is shrugging their shoulders. She is simply beyond reliable."

— Ryan Brown

‹ Anecdotal