MindLog
The app that lets you help yourself.
Timeline: 8 weeks
Role: Solo UI/UX Designer & Researcher
Tools: Figma, Notion
In this UI/UX case study, I explored and tested my solution to helping young adults without access to professional mental health services manage and maintain their own mental health. I conducted research, which included user interviews & surveys, iteratively prototyped and user tested at each stage, and designed a high-fidelity, interactive prototype of the app.
Young adults acknowledge their mental health issues but lack sustainable and accessible methods of tackling them.
PROBLEM
The topic of mental health is less stigmatized in the current generation of young adults, but many of us grapple with factors like cost, time, and resources to engage with our own mental health in meaningful and effective ways. How can we change this?
SOLUTION
Create a customized routine of personal, meaningful reflection over time.
By engaging individuals in consistent meaningful self-reflection, they’ll eventually build resilience in working through stress, anxiety, and other negative impacts. As a result, when stressful situations occur, individuals will have a greater sense of control over their selves and mental state.
HOW DO WE ACHIEVE THIS?
Contact me if you would like to view the Figma prototype!
PROCESS
Investigate young adults’ attitudes toward mental health and how they talk about it.
Investigate ways young adults care for their own mental health.
Understand factors that inhibit young adults from seeking mental health care.
Understand how inadequate mental health care affects young adults.
Investigate the physical and virtual spaces young adults discuss mental health in.
Research Objectives
DESK RESEARCH
I began with desk research, and this important and surprising slap stat stuck out to me. Perceived stress includes all aspects of external sources of stress relevant to an individual rather than the source of stress by itself. In other words, it’s the individual’s feelings on how much stress they’re experiencing from a single source.
Perceived stress in stress-inducing experiences is a major factor in low mental health.
From my user interviews in my target demographic (18-35 years old), I combined my findings with my desk research to affinity map and synthesize them.
USER INTERVIEWS & SURVEYS
Through synthesizing and analyzing my research, I was able to pinpoint three major insights and draw subsequent areas of opportunity from them.
INSIGHTS & OPPORTUNITIES
I created user archetypes based on the user behavior and preferences I gathered from my research. I specifically chose to create archetypes rather than personas because I wanted to focus more specifically on users’ needs and how to target those needs and felt other descriptive information in this case was irrelevant, as I already had a target demographic established.
USER EMPATHY
To further empathize with the user's behavior, I created a journey map of current mental health help methods that would cause users to keep encountering hindrances to maintaining their mental health.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
I conducted a competitor analysis on three other popular apps focused on mental health improvement and stress reduction. Overall, I found that Calm and Headspace were focused on using regular methods such as meditation and ASMR sounds to help the user without seeking to identify the causes of users' issues or provide insight to mental health trends. Woebot, while using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, may prove too taxing or take too long for users to engage meaningfully with it.
To narrow down the core features I wanted in the app, I created its information architecture. In doing so, I wanted to ensure finding content and steps is as easy and fluid as possible for users.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
For my design process, I began with hand-sketching, specifically the graphing component, as that was the most important feature and the one that users would engage with the most daily. I then went through three rounds of usability testing with the graph, implementing feedback I received after each round, until the rate of successfully mapping and reviewing points was 100%.
DESIGN PROCESS
DESIGN SYSTEM
I discovered that even though I would plan each step in a timeline, there would often be points where I would have to retrace my steps to conduct further research or devote more time to iterating a certain function or feature. Since I'm also usually a big picture thinker, this project was an exercise and challenge in being detail-oriented, which ended up helping with big picture thinking in the long run.
If I were to continue this further, I would like to prototype it more thoroughly and user test it with more people, especially therapists and other professionals in the mental health field. An initial opportunity I wanted to explore but did not manage to build out via research was how well MindLog would be able to supplement therapists' work, for example in supporting their findings or helping their patients establish or change specific behaviors.
REFLECTION