Designing for Emotional Well-Being: A Kansei-Based Approach to Developing a Mental Health App for University Students

University students experience increasing mental health difficulties because of academic load, emotional shifts, and limited access to personalised wellness resources. This paper presents MoodBloom, a mobile mental health application designed with Kansei Engineering (KE), a methodology that converts feelings into specific design specifications. The study used a three-stage Kansei process — Kansei Research, Kansei Analysis, and Product Design — to integrate functional demands with emotional design components. During early development, a formative evaluation was conducted to understand expert perceptions of functional usability of the Moodbloom prototype through task-based testing. The summative evaluation used a high-fidelity prototype with 35 university students to validate the application’s emotional effectiveness and assess the presence and strength of each Kansei element in the user experience. The study identified seven Kansei elements—calm, supportive, reassured, peaceful, comforted, joyous, and connected—and applied them as evaluation criteria. Results demonstrated that MoodBloom's design effectively produced a digital space that is not only useful in a functional sense but also emotionally calming and resonant. The evaluation confirmed that all seven Kansei elements were consistently present and effectively expressed in the app's design. The research shows the need for emotionally sensitive design in preventive mental health aids. It provides a framework for future development in higher education settings, despite being restricted to a non-clinical student population.