Seek & Settle

The Vision

Seek & Settle was born from a desire to help people connect their daily actions with deeper values. I created over 60 original illustrations, each paired with an insightful message, and mapped them to four psychological pathways that support various wellness activities.

The core of the project is a lightweight, reflective check-in tool that reduces the friction in self-reflection, captures meaningful context (not just numerical scores), and reveals patterns that help users make better choices over time.

My Role

As the creator of Seek & Settle, I handled the entire development process:

• Creating 60+ original illustrations and accompanying messages
• Researching and mapping psychological pathways to wellness activities
• Designing the user experience and check-in flow
• Building the technical architecture using Vue components
• Implementing data visualization with Chart.js
• Ensuring performance, accessibility, and responsive behavior

The Approach

My focus was creating a calm, fast daily check-in that would capture thoughtful data and present clear, adaptable insights:

The illustrations came first - each one designed to visually represent a specific insight or practice. I spent months refining these, ensuring they struck the right balance between being visually engaging and meaningfully instructive.

For the psychological framework, I researched various approaches to well-being and identified four key pathways that encompass different aspects of mental wellness. Each illustration and activity was then mapped to these pathways, creating a cohesive system rather than just random tips.

When building the check-in experience, I prioritized low-friction interaction. The three-step, multi-modal design reduced cognitive load, with only the "Day Rating" (0-10) required and everything else optional. This kept the momentum going and prevented abandonment.

For the technical implementation, I created reusable UI components like the scale rating, emotion picker, and text inputs. These components used v-model support and emits for clean one-way data flow, making the architecture both flexible and maintainable.

The dashboard needed to provide genuine insight, not just data. I designed visualizations that showed multi-metric trends, day-of-week patterns, sentiment trends, and emotion tracking. Everything was theme-aware and responsive, adapting seamlessly between light and dark modes.

Throughout development, I focused on robustness and performance: Chart.js load resilience with custom events, proper high-DPI canvas sizing, and small, focused components to keep rendering fast and logic testable.

Technical Highlights

• Progressive, low-friction check-in: A three-step experience with reusable UI primitives like PDAScaleRating, PDAEmotionPicker, and PDATextInput
• Insightful dashboard: Filterable ranges with computed summaries of average ratings, check-in count, common emotions, and streaks
• Thoughtful visualizations: Multi-metric trends, day-of-week averages, sentiment analysis, and emotion tracking
• Theme awareness: CSS custom properties for colors, with charts that auto-adapt to light/dark themes
• Performance optimizations: Defensive third-party loading, lifecycle cleanup, and focused components

The Outcome

Seek & Settle achieved several key objectives:

• A guided check-in experience that most users can complete in under a minute
• A cohesive collection of 60+ illustrations that provide visual anchors for wellness concepts
• Clear visual trends that encourage genuine reflection rather than focusing on vanity metrics
• A flexible architecture that makes iteration and enhancement straightforward
• An experience that works equally well as a modal flow or embedded page section

Key Learnings

This passion project reinforced several important principles:

• Progressive disclosure genuinely reduces abandonment—making only one field required keeps users engaged
• Decoupling UI from persistence (via emits) creates a more flexible, testable system
• Theme-aware visualizations significantly improve perceived polish
• The combination of quantitative scores and qualitative inputs (emotions, short text) produces more actionable insights
• Even personal projects benefit from professional architectural approaches

Seek & Settle represents a fusion of my artistic vision, technical skills, and interest in psychology. It's a project that continues to evolve as I gain insights from users and experiment with new ways to help people align their actions with their deeper values.