Self-care areas are a way to organize and group your goals, and we provide some suggested areas that we think are foundational to self-care (eg. movement, gratitude, etc). Within each area we provide suggested goals, as well as visualizations to track your progress in that area. You also have the ability to fully customize areas to suit your needs, if none of the suggested areas fit.
Do you have any ideas or feedback you’d like to share about self-care areas? Please email them to us at [email protected] because your ideas help us improve the app for everyone!
We want to help you engage in self-care every day so you can feel your best. Self-care is a very broad topic and each person has a different definition of what self-care means to them. There are also many people who haven’t even thought about self-care and need extra guidance to know how to even begin working on self-care.
Journeys was our initial attempt at solving this problem. However, through user feedback we realized that Journeys were not easily understandable by the average person. By the time we decided to focus on self-care areas, the majority of Finch users were not using Journeys at all. This means that in a world with only Journeys, we aren’t able to guide the majority of people with their self-care. Self-care guidance is only accessible for those who have a network that can help them get set up, or who are tech-savy and can figure it out on their own. However, we want self-care to be accessible to everyone.
Tutorials are always an option we consider but we unfortunately do not think it will solve the root problem. We have talked with many people in-person about journeys (user interviews, our friends and family) and there’s too many different aspects that cause confusion and require a lot of lengthy explanations.
For very engaged users, tutorials can honestly be great. But if we truly want to normalize self-care for everyone, we need to be able to design features to be as self-explanatory as possible. In the case of Journeys, tutorials would be a bandaid that can help a very small set of users who are likely power users, but largely leave most people confused as a Journeys tutorial would require high friction and effort to understand. We’ve tried in-app tutorials on simpler features for new users at Finch and have yet to find success from tutorials alone.
Creating features that are self-explanatory is a tough design bar that we can hit or miss, but it’s the one we always need to aim for. At times we only need to try small adjustments to resolve user confusion, and we do make changes to the product a lot in this manner. But if there is a very high amount of user confusion like the type we see for Journeys, then it’s a clear sign that we need to simplify things further beyond bandaids. We recognize though that changes to a feature can create discomfort for existing users and we take that seriously. So we put in a lot of thought and only consider bigger changes if we think we’ve exhausted other alternative paths.