Shy's Space Design Hackathon 02: Mapping the Dreamscape Winner
Nimora: More than dream journaling
Dreams are often forgotten within minutes of waking up. Even when they are recorded, they usually become another note sitting quietly in a journal. Yet dreams are more than memories.
Timeline
5 Weeks
Role
Product Designer & Team Lead
Used Tools
Figma, FigJam, Google Form
Leveraged Skills
UX Research, Product Strategy, Information Architecture, Interaction Design
Overview
Most dream journaling apps help users record dreams. But what happens after that?
They can reflect emotions, stress, fears, hopes, and thoughts that we may not fully recognize in our daily lives. This question became the starting point for Nimora. An emotion-focused dream journaling experience designed to help people not only capture dreams, but understand the emotions behind them.
Project Timeline
My Role: Product Designer & Team Lead
Responsibilities
Product Strategy
UX Research
Information Architecture
User Flow Design
Feature Prioritization
User Experience and Interface Design
Team
Lwin Moe Thwin - Product Designer & Team Lead
Khaing Thazin Thinn - UI/UX Designer
Zaw Linn Htet - Logo Designer & UI Designer
Outcome: Shy's Space Design Hackathon 02: Mapping the Dreamscape Winner
Understanding Dream Behaviors
Before designing anything, we wanted to understand how people currently think about dreams.
We conducted quantitative survey research with over 60 participants between the ages of 16 and 35.
Our goal was to explore:
Dream recording habits
Emotional reflection behaviors
Pain points with existing journaling methods
Expectations for dream reflection experiences
Rather than focusing solely on dream interpretation, we wanted to understand the relationship between dreams and emotions.
The image below is the quick data mapping generated by Claude using our research responses to reduce time constrains.
What We Discovered
The research revealed something interesting. People weren't simply trying to remember dreams. They were trying to understand themselves.
Dreams Fade Quickly
Many participants reported forgetting dreams shortly after waking. Even meaningful dreams often disappeared before they could be recorded.
This revealed a critical challenge: How might we help users capture dreams before they fade?
People Seek Meaning
Many participants expressed curiosity about dream meanings and recurring emotional patterns. They weren't just looking for a place to store dreams.
They wanted a way to reflect on them. This shifted our perspective. The opportunity wasn't dream storage. The opportunity was emotional reflection.
Privacy Creates Safety
Dreams often contain deeply personal experiences. Many participants were hesitant to share dream-related thoughts publicly. They wanted a space that felt personal, private, and emotionally safe.
Trust would become a key design principle.
Personas
We identified three primary behavioral groups according to our research result.
The Curious Reflector
Privacy Focused Dreamers
The Social Dream Explorers
Defining the Opportunities
After synthesizing our research, we translated pain points and insights into design opportunities. These opportunities became the very foundation of Nimora's feature strategy. And our goals include:
Record Dreams Instantly
Understand Emotions Behind Dreams
Track emotional patterns over-time
Reflect through AI-assisted conversations
Feel safe and privately supported
From Insights to Opportunities
One thing became clear during research. Dream recording is often an early-morning activity.
Users are tired.
Sometimes half awake.
Sometimes rushing to start their day.
That meant every additional step created friction. To support this behavior, we mapped the primary user journeys and focused on reducing effort wherever possible.
Information Architecture
To support discoverability and long-term engagement, we organized the experience into four primary areas and separate dream recording, emotional analysis, and discovery experiences while keeping navigation simple.
Home
Insights
Explore
Settings or Profile
Dream Entry User Flow
Users can instantly capture dreams through voice or text immediately after waking. The flows were intentionally simplified to minimize effort during early morning interactions.
MVP Prioritization
Hackathons come with strict time constraints and weekly tasks. While we identified many opportunities during research, not everything could be included in this First Version.
To stay focused, we used the MoSCoW framework -
Must Have
Should Have
Could Have
Won't Have
to prioritize features based on user value and implementation feasibility. This helped our team focus on delivering the most meaningful experience within the available timeframe.
Introducing Nimora
Nimora was designed as a companion for emotional reflection. An experience that helps users capture dreams, understand emotions, and identify patterns hidden within their nightly experiences. Unlike traditional journaling apps, Nimora is a companion app that help users reflect their emotions and focuses not only on recording dreams, but on understanding the emotions and experiences behind them.
Solution
Fast Dream Entry
One of the strongest insights from our research was that dream memories fade quickly after waking. To reduce friction, Nimora allows users to instantly record dreams through either voice or text entry from a single primary action. By minimizing the number of steps required, users can capture their thoughts before memories disappear, making dream journaling feel effortless even during early morning moments.
Emotion Orb Jar
Traditional journaling experiences often feel passive. Users write an entry, save it, and rarely revisit it. We wanted reflection to feel more engaging and rewarding over time. This led to the creation of the Emotion Orb Jar, a visual collection system that transforms recorded emotions into collectible emotion orbs. As users continue journaling, they gradually build a visual representation of their emotional journey. This approach turns reflection into something more personal and memorable while helping users recognize recurring emotional patterns.
AI-Assisted Reflection
During research, many participants expressed curiosity about the meaning behind their dreams but felt unsure how to interpret them on their own. Rather than providing generic dream interpretations, we designed an AI-assisted reflection experience that encourages deeper self-exploration through conversation. The goal is not to tell users what their dreams mean, but to help them uncover their own emotional insights and patterns through guided reflection.
Wireframes
With research insights and priorities defined, we translated our MoSCoW framework directly into wireframes keeping fidelity intentionally low to focus decisions on structure and flow rather than visual design.
Each screen maps to a validated user need from the survey. Nothing was included without a data point to justify it.
From Structure to Interface design logic
Home Screen
The home screen is the first thing both new and returning users see after logging in which covers the entire experience. Users can not only browse and revisit past entries, but add a new one via voice or text.
The mood jar at the top surfaces emotional patterns passively, with no extra action needed. This responds directly to a key research finding: 82% of users think about their dreams but rarely do anything intentional with them.
The list/grid toggle was added after recognising that a grid layout truncated dream descriptions too aggressively for meaningful browsing.
The navigation label shift from "Library" to "Explore" reflects an evolution in product thinking from storage-first to discovery-first, aligned with the 43% of users who said their goal was to explore dreams in a fun way.
Dream entry by voice
The voice entry flow is the app's answer to the single biggest barrier in the research forgetting quickly. Users speak their dream, the audio is transcribed in real time, and the result becomes an editable text entry. The barrier of having to type while half-asleep is removed entirely.
The flow moves through five states: recording, transcribing, editing, overview, and the final saved entry. After transcription, users add a title, rate clarity on a vague-to-clear scale, and select an emotion three lightweight inputs that feed directly into the insights and orb jar features without demanding significant effort at capture time and related dream tags. The dream overview then surfaces an AI-generated insight and related dreams before the entry is saved, giving users immediate value in exchange for logging.
Dream Insight
The insights screen is split into two tabs Calendar and Reflection each serving a different relationship with time.
The Calendar tab gives users a chronological view of their dream history. Dots on individual dates signal logged entries at a glance, and selecting a date surfaces that day's dreams in a list below. An empty state "no dreams recorded on this date" was included deliberately, treating gaps in the record as meaningful information rather than errors.
The Reflection tab shifts from navigation to analysis. An emotion overview, anchored by the mood jar, breaks down feelings across five states: fear, anger, sadness, happiness, and unease. Below it, a ranked list of most-used dream tags reveals recurring themes across the user's entire history. Dream clarity and giving users a sense of how their recall quality changes over time.
Emotion Orb Jar
The orb jar is the app's most distinctive feature, a monthly emotional portrait built passively from dream entries, visualised as coloured orbs filling a glass jar over time. The orb jar gives users a monthly emotional portrait built passively from dream entries no manual input required. Each month gets its own jar that fills with coloured orbs as emotions are logged across five states: happiness, sadness, anger, unease, and fear. Empty months and future months are handled with distinct states one inviting past entries, the other building quiet anticipation keeping the experience encouraging rather than punishing.
The export feature adds a social layer without compromising privacy. Users can save or share their monthly jar as a stylised image in light or dark template, turning a personal reflection into something shareable entirely on their own terms.
Dream Assistant
The app's conversational AI, a dream interpreter users can ask questions to directly, referencing specific entries from their journal. Users can attach a dream to the conversation and ask anything from symbol meanings to cross-dream connections, with responses grounded in their own recorded content.
Conversations reset on exit, no history is saved. This reduces infrastructure cost and complexity, keeping the feature viable outside the MVP build while maintaining privacy by default.
Future Roadmap
Nimora's core loop is capture, reflect, understand. The more entries a user adds, the smarter and more personal the experience becomes. Two directions will shape what comes after MVP.
Smarter reflection
AI insights start generic and grow more personal over time learning from each user's recurring emotions, dream themes, and reflection habits to surface meaning that actually feels relevant.
Wellness & sleep integration
Dreams don't happen in isolation. Future versions will connect dream content to sleep quality, daily mood, and emotional wellbeing expanding Nimora from a dream journal into a broader self-understanding tool.
Reflection
Nimora taught us the importance of designing beyond functionality.
What began as a dream journaling concept evolved into a reflection experience focused on emotions, patterns, and self-understanding.
The project reinforced the value of research-driven decision-making, prioritization under constraints, and designing for emotional experiences rather than just tasks.
Most importantly, it demonstrated how thoughtful design can transform simple journaling into a meaningful tool for self-reflection.
Outcome
🏆 Shy's Space Design Hackathon 02: Mapping the Dreamscape Winner
Nimora was awarded First Prize during the hackathon and recognized for its strong research foundation, emotional focus, and innovative approach to dream journaling.