Background-
This is called ALOHA Cards, and it is an app for Cognitive Behavioral tools. It uses a card style to teach the content. It’s designed to put common ‘practice at home’ therapy techniques in the palm of your hand. It goes through CBT, ACT, DBT, and Chain Analysis tools to use when you face distressing situations. I created it with Behavioral Professionals and used my own practice with many scientific sources for the content.
Screenshot / ad image -
Thank You’s-
I have to start by thanking Tatiang for helping me get started with learning Thunkable. He, Muneer, and Jared have all been essential in me teaching myself how to build this app. I currently have 3 more projects in mind and look forward to sharing those with everyone in the future. The community has been a boon in figuring out how to use the Thunkable platform. Thank you also to my CBT mentor for coming up with the content that we put into the app.
Links-
iOS:
Android:
Follow Up’s-
June 21, 2022 [Updated]
Forgot to share on here when the update posted. A complete rework of the navigation and the cards themselves. Android was released, and both Android and iOS are now in parity.
March 4, 2022 [Update coming]
Working on getting an update approved for publishing to switch the navigation to a bottom tab style in the iOS version too.
Feb 26, 2022 [Initial Posting]
Thank you for checking us out! Feel free to go to the websites in the iOS store page and check us out. This is the first mobile app I have made and published. It will be evolving as I learn new things and hopefully with more content. Have a pleasant day!
Awesome! The crew here is so diverse!
RE: Aloha ABA,no we’re not. That actually makes me concerned! We did so much looking for names and didn’t find very many with those results; I hope we don’t step on any toes!
Our company is Neurogenesis Holistic Lab, LLC. We operate as a partnership, and have our own practices on the side. I am just a Behavioral Coach, but I try to apply all the Behavioral Sciences I can, while still staying in my legal and professional wheelhouse. AKA, no diagnosis, no therapeutic authority, etc… I would love to become a registered psychologist, and even looked into BCBA and ABA, but it’s not in my schedule right now. For the current time, I get CE certifications for fields that I qualify for.
We wanted to take my mentors idea for how she works with her clients and make it available for anyone to use at any time!
You’re welcome! Congrats on making and publishing this app. I’ll definitely check it out. $14.99 is a little steep for me to just try out an app. Any chance you could send me a promo code? I’d be happy to purchase the app if I end up using it. I’m quite curious about how you implemented CBT and DBT.
I appreciate it! For you, I can do that. You’ve been so helpful to me. I’ll get it set up and then send you a DM with it. And since you have knowledge on the platform, feel free to send feedback. I know there are improvements that I can do. I already have updates slated; but the Apple Rep that I spoke with suggested giving it a couple weeks before submitting. Just more time to work out the UI in my opinion! lol
Here’s some feedback from using your app for a little while. As a developer, I tend to share mostly critical thoughts because I don’t personally find “nice app!” kinds of comments very useful. So be forewarned that I’m focusing on what I think you can improve…
When it first opens, there is a note to tap the Help button. But without doing that, you can’t know how to use the app which requires swiping to display the navigator. I think it would be good to offer a visual indication of the navigator. Maybe have that section of the screen light up for a moment with an arrow/hand, something like that. Because the first time I used the app, I didn’t think it worked… I couldn’t figure out how to do anything until I tapped the Help button. My preference as a developer is to automatically show the Help screen/video on first launch and then allow the user to view it again from a button rather than just suggesting they tap the button.
I’m personally not a fan of side navigators. They do give you more screen real estate and that seems important with the kind of app you’re making. But I’d rather see buttons on-screen all the time where I can access them easily and not have to swipe to view a menu. That’s just one person’s opinion!
For me, the general look of the app is too cluttered. People who need DBT/CBT skills are often stressed/overwhelmed/anxious and seeing so much text at once seems like too much information at once for me. A typical menu screen on your app can have as many as 150 words on it. If you look at something like the Calm app, icons and brief phrases are used to give the user an idea of the content they should expect. There’s also a lot of repeated content that isn’t necessary. For example, in Section 1: Chain Analysis, each color bar of text is headlined by “Psych Fun Facts” and “Our Brain on Stress” as well as the title of that particular card/topic. I think that could be consolidated into a single category/heading.
I hope you don’t mind me sharing a screenshot of your paid app. If you do, I can remove this image from the post. I think it’s helpful to have an example of what I’m referring to:
Any time you have sound effects (e.g. the page flip sound), there should be a way to turn off those sounds.
The cards themselves (not pictured in the screenshot above) seem to have a lot of good information and suggestions for journaling activities, etc. I’m not a therapist so I can’t comment in detail about their accuracy or effectiveness. I do think the cards don’t use enough white space to separate ideas visually. They are also cluttered. I’m sure it’s hard to fit that much information on a single screen but I’d be curious to know how other users react to that much text on a screen without line breaks and wider margins.
I find white text on a lime green background hard to read. It could be my partial color-blindness but it’s a strain for me.
It’s hard to tell what to focus on with respect to the cards. Do I read them one-by-one in order? Do I skip around? I can’t tell how they are organized because there are so many in one long list. It might be better to break them up into sections on separate screens. Topics like Grounding can be great in-the-moment skills to use when overwhelmed/in a crisis. You might put those in a quickly-accessible section of the app rather than buried in a long list of activities.
Sharing a few screenshots with a graphic designer could give you a sense of how to improve the look and feel of the app. I often find that graphic designers have insights that I don’t even notice or have the expertise to comment on. Things like color choices, font compatibility, the aforementioned white space, etc.
I think your app has so much potential! It just needs to be accessible to a wide audience of people who need these reminders and activities.
Constructive critique is more helpful than pats on the back; especially since my partner wants to profit on this! I’ll take it point by point (and with a pinch of salt).
I played with multiple ways of teaching the user where the navigation is at, and this was the best solution I cam up with to make the least amount of change. I had a pop-up at one time, but couldn’t get it to consistently trigger in my testing due to stored variables and cache data. I didn’t want to rely on chance with the trigger (and at the time the whole iOS mp4 thing was still not working). However, after looking through some of my older posts, I realized that Muneer suggested a fix for the white bars that I was trying to hide on iOS by using the side panel nav; so this has actually already been addressed in the version that will be updated in the next week. It’s the bottom tab nav to match the Android style.
Will be changed; See above lol
This was a design choice by the founder/creator of the cards. I see the point you are making, but that control is in the hands of the content designer. What I have control of is the DVL where it says the title of the card and subtitle, etc. I can pass these thoughts on to the designer and see what she thinks. I do like the style of Calm. Not sure how to accomplish that though. Thoughts? DVG? Images in a Column that work as buttons?
I thought of that but I’m not sure how to do that. Edit: I just realized there is an “Any component” for sounds. I will take this under advisement. Would an Any Component work with a switch and a stored variable?
This has been something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but that which is mostly out of my control. There are a few cards that I designed, but for the most part - it was not in my wheelhouse.
Lime green does not make a very reader friendly color in general. Black is about the only color that works. I’ll pass on the feedback.
Is this in reference to specifically the Skills cards?
Thank you for the feedback. This has been a long process for the last 9 months getting them from “laminated, printed at home on 8x10 papers” with almost no organization to what you see today. The project outgrew the original plan and I think now we are trying to catch up. I’ve been working on some other, simpler projects in my spare time.
I also am considering a switch to go from the colorful ALOHA style to a more subtle “Dark Mode” theme… If the designer is on board with it. I want to include that in later versions though. I want people who have spent their money to feel like I haven’t abandoned the app once it’s published.
I’ll find a time to answer your questions in a bit more depth but just a few responses while I have a moment…
#7 It’s more about the long list of cards full of text. It’s visually overwhelming and I can’t figure out how things are categorized or grouped or just how to move through the app. Many developers make a flow chart or wireframe that shows how users “walk” through the app. I’m curious what your would look like because I think going through that process could highlight some of the problems. If the flow chart is just “view skills cards → display long list of 20 skill cards with 150 words per card → click on a card → click back,” I think that needs improvement.
To be blunt, the feeling I get using your app is discomfort. I hope you’re getting feedback from multiple people because that will either confirm my perspective or challenge it. I also don’t think it’s a $15 app the way it looks. Much of that comes down to things that are out of your control like the spacing of content on the skills cards themselves. But some of it is under your control. I don’t think a long list of cards that all look the same is a good way to present this information. Maybe instead, a slideshow format where you see one skill card, then you swipe (a feature I’m hoping Thunkable adds soon!) or press a button to go to the next. Even just having half a dozen categories that the user starts from would improve the experience a lot. But if I were looking toward making a profit with a partner, I’d have a real heart-to-heart about the look of the cards because that much text on the screen, especially when multiple cards are presented in a list, is a graphic design problem.
