Interaction - Bachelors

Cooldown

University students often struggle to deal with stress and anxiety. Cooldown is a desktop application that aims to calm students down by creating beautiful visuals and relaxing ambient music. In just ten minutes, users will begin to feel less stressed, less worried and less anxious.

Blair Arbouin
The problem

University stress

University students frequently experience elevated levels of stress and anxiety, driven by demanding academic responsibilities, heavy workloads, relationship challenges, and various social pressures. Balancing these commitments often leaves students feeling overwhelmed, impacting their mental health and overall well-being.
The solution
I created a musical tool that provides a form of mental relief to its users. The ambient music it creates has a calming quality. By designing an accessible, interactive, and relaxing musical experience, my design aims to offer students a quick and effective way to reduce anxiety and stress.
List of visual possibilities and patterns

Endless Possibilities

Cooldown’s spiral visual slowly evolves over time to produce satisfying circular patterns, and the audio works in the same way. The subtle alterations are enough to keep you in an immersive flow state.
I spent a lot of time refining the interface to ensure simplicity, with user testing playing a crucial role in shaping an intuitive UX. As a music producer, I had to re-evaluate my assumptions about what non-musicians would find intuitive. For instance, the original prototype used knobs, but users struggled with these on a trackpad. Based on this feedback, I switched to sliders, achieving a much smoother user experience.

The interface maintains a streamlined layout with just 11 controls, yet, as you saw above, users can achieve a diverse range of outcomes with this minimal setup.

Blair Arbouin

Blair is one of the unfortunate designers who has been tasked with writing a bio about himself in third person. He aims to prop himself up to appear like an invaluable candidate to future employers and onlookers of this website. To achieve this, Blair will want to toe the line between confidence and humility to maximise the chance that employers grant him a salary at their company. Blair runs his own online business selling music software and also currently works as a UX/UI designer. Blair is now happy that he has finished writing his biography.