A digital companion that helps young adults gain clarity over their possessions and purchases, co-makes real-time decisions with them at the cart, and motivates behaviour change through goals and insights.
The origin
It started with a shopping ban. After moving from Beijing back to Singapore and being horrified by the sheer volume of stuff that had accumulated, I gave myself a year where I couldn't buy makeup or clothes. The project is the thesis I built around that question: is there a more balanced, structured way to change my shopping behaviour?
The problem
Buy buttons are one tap away; reflection is buried several screens deep. Research surfaced a clinical condition — Oniomania, or Compulsive Buying Disorder — but existing support services were either medical (social stigma, high barrier of entry) or purely self-regulatory apps that don't target buying behaviours directly.
Fieldwork with Dr. Lui Yit Shiang at NUH's Department of Psychological Medicine, and with Credit Counselling Singapore, confirmed it: the people most affected were young adults, and the help available wasn't embedded into their day-to-day shopping life.
The design statement
Designing for a purposeful delay for young adults to reflect and reshape their shopping decisions.
The approach
The project went through four design iterations — from an early simulated shopping experience (Fermata) with fake credit cards and Google Forms, through three versions of Hibi — each validated with in-person user testing and expert feedback from medical and financial-counselling professionals.
