Starting Conversations About Mental Health
The Team: Arielle Moore, Brian Harris, Nathan Jolley, Nikki Weekes
My Role: UX Designer, Website Front-End Developer
The Solution: To design a mobile app that can help people start conversations about mental health with others and to deliver free resources into the hands of those that are searching for and need help.
The Problem: Mental health is an important issue and has become more widespread than ever before. Those who struggle with their mental health can find it difficult to discuss their issues with others while some find it difficult to approach those they love and start conversations about their mental health.
The Tools: Miro, Adobe XD, Anima, Zoom
Mental Health Review & Statistics
Mental Health - it’s an important global issue that impacts our communities, work places, churches, and our homes. Mental health isn’t something that some people have and some don’t. We all fall somewhere on a spectrum of mental wellness and we all have loved ones who struggle with their mental health and needs help.
We discovered that there is no shortage of research related to mental health. It can be found in abundance. This is an important topic that hits home for many and it is constantly being researched. It is clear many are struggling with their mental health.
As part of our research plan we sent out a survey using Usability Hub and also conducted several interviews. We discovered four main requirements in a mental health app.
Accessibility - Help be available at any time and any place
Little / No Cost - Money should not be a factor in finding help
Flexibility - Different people and different needs
Help others - Find help and be able to find help for others
Competitive Analysis & Finding Funding
The marketplace for mental health apps is highly competitive and many good apps are available. There are apps for affirmations, journaling, mindfulness, meditations, suicide prevention, and so much more. We wondered if there was room in the marketplace for another app.
We conducted a competitive analysis across some of the popular mental health and discovered that some of the competition didn’t deliver on the requirements we uncovered. We also noticed that if we focused on having the core functionality centered on how to start conversations around mental health that we might have a mobile app that could stand out in the marketplace.
To finance our project we discovered that federal and state programs and grants are available to help fund projects like these. Other channels for funding available also include non-profits, charitable donors, and crowd funding.
Meet Our User Personas
Meet Sam and Lyla our user personas that we created from what we learned from our research and also from each learned from each other as we discussed the issue of mental health. It became very easy for us to relate to and have empathy for what people are dealing with when they themselves struggle or are a witness to seeing a loved one struggle with mental health challenges.
Sam is a hard working and loving father who isn’t comfortable about opening up and sharing his emotions. A close friend of his recently passed away. He is struggling with grief and anxiety but doesn’t feel comfortable talking.
Lyla is Sam’s 14 year old daughter who has challenges of her own with her peers at school and is also very observant at home and can tell her dad is struggling. She wants to help but doesn’t know how to begin a conversation with her dad.
Sam needs someone to reach out to him because he knows he needs to talk about what he's going through. However, he doesn't want to feel like he's imposing on anyone or burdening others with his "negative" feelings.
The Ideation Phase
We began our ideation phase by first selecting a name we thought would be apropos to mental health struggles and settled on Positron. We selected Positron because we felt it conveyed the message of bringing positive energy into people’s lives.
We designed lo-fi & mid-fi prototypes that allowed us to:
Ideate on animation
Explore onboarding process
Explore the “begin a conversation” process
Apply styles from style guide
Introduced animation concepts
Created content and added to screens
Iterated on user flows and onboarding
Hi-Fidelity Prototypes
Made adjustments to copy to reflect the real world
Iterated on user flows after another round of usability testing
Made UI adjustments with color and layout
Altered the conversations user flow screens based usability tests
Key Takeaways
Ample Data & Research. We relied on the ample data and research already out there surrounding public health over conducting our own. This helped us create our personas and spend more time on ideation and usability testing.
Go Teamwork! It’s great when a team works together. We had to rely on each others’s strengths and skillsets to get the job done. Some of the team members were more skilled in prototyping, some with front end experience, and others with backgrounds in research.
Future Roadmapping. We learned from our testing that users were interested to do so much more with the app than we had originally planned. Finding a crisis hotline number, filtering therapists, reading success stories of others, and providing video tutorials on how to use the app, were just some of the features users requested during our usability studies.