My Lockdown Journal – a Gamified Journaling App supporting Citizens’ Wellbeing during COVID-19 Lockdowns

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the lockdowns in response to it, massively disrupted the daily routines of people around the world. To stay isolated at home for long periods can come at an extreme detriment to one’s comfort, and although the pandemic brought with it a wave of digital applications with the aim of keeping people safe, few of these presented features that could directly support users’ wellbeing. “My Lockdown Journal” was an app designed by the UCL IRDR Centre for Digital Public Health in Emergencies (dPHE) that presented opportunity for users to journal their daily activity over the course of lockdowns. It was rapidly developed using components of other dPHE projects and released in May 2020, garnering more than 1400 unique users across the world that recorded their activities over the course of 2 years. Activity records had high granularity, providing details on the type of activity, the time the user did it, their satisfaction with it, and their answers to some follow-up questions (e.g. activity location, whether it was online or virtual). Daily reporting was encouraged by three gamification features: (i) social media competition, (ii) badges, and (iii) a self-evaluative “analytics” page. The app design and deployment are both presented in this paper alongside an evaluation of its gamification features. Overall, My Lockdown Journal demonstrated that journaling and activity recording provided valuable support to users while also generating a rich dataset of human behaviour during lockdowns that can be used to inform public health policy in the next pandemic.