Mental Health App

Project Information

This case study represents one sprint within a conglomeration of different UX Research and Design projects I have been working on with the Institute for Media Innovation (IMI). At this time I cannot post detailed information about those aspects of the product which will contribute to its success in the market. This case study is intended to provide you with an overview of my contributions as part of a small team housed within the Moody College of Communication and the University of Texas at Austin.

Methods & Tools

We incorporated a literature review, stakeholder meetings, competitive analysis, sketching, wireframing, feature prioritization, card sorting, design critiques, and prototyping. We primarily used Whimsical and Figma. We incorporated Scrum project management methodologies with a design sprint planning meeting and iteration reviews.

Timeline

About 3 weeks

Contributors

Myself, our project manager/supervisor, an engineer, and another UX designer.

My role

UX Researcher - I often encouraged the team to pause in order to justify our designs. I used low-investment but high-yield methods like card sorting and competitor analysis to start discussions with my team so we could justify design decisions. I often kept documents of our ongoing questions and constantly sought clarification on the whats and whys. For example:

• What could our app offer in comparison to others already available?

• Why would we incorporate specific design elements, like a slider instead of a button?

• How could we ensure that our design choices are testable with users?

UX Designer - Although our backgrounds varied we were each strongly encouraged to test our visual design skills (I successfully converted a developer to a Whimsical lover) and used Figma for more high-fidelity designs. For each design challenge, we were first encouraged to create wireframes or sketches individually, which allowed for us to create next iterations as a team and to discourage a focus that was too narrow. This approach allowed us to discuss what was feasible for our MVP design while holding on to more complex ideas for later iterations.

Design Sprint Planning

Before I was brought on to the team, IMI had already completed user research aimed at understanding the needs of peer support specialists and clients and designed an app based on those needs - you can find a summary of that work here.

I was teamed up with a UX Designer and a Developer in order to design a new survey feature to be housed within the existing app. Our project lead encouraged us to create a prototype for an MVP and initially our constraints were very broad. Essentially we were to incorporate a survey method which users of the app would respond to frequently.

Project Goals

• We wanted the new survey feature to incorporate findings from scholarly literature; our product was to be used not only as a tool for users in addressing their mental health but as a way to examine this unique delivery of mental health care and report back on its effectiveness.

• We were to keep in mind all the variables for the data we would collect with each survey response. Design choices would affect the way we would display insights to users later.

• We would design a new feature for an existing app that would continue to be useful to clients, clinicians, and customer organizations; the service delivery involved with the app was (and continues to be) complex.

Literature Review

I did not have experience with the sampling method that our feature was going to use, therefore I took a few days to read and take thorough notes on relevant research that detailed how others had used this method before. The literature review ended up being extremely valuable because we were able to anticipate common roadblocks based on their work. We also got a clearer idea of the best practices to incorporate when using this survey method. The literature brought up several questions that I used to prompt thoughtful discussions with my colleagues. You can see examples of some of my notes from this work below.

Competitive Analysis

After I reviewed some of the relevant literature and made notes, I felt curious about how our app would compare to competitors in the market who were already attempting to alleviate mental health challenges for users. I compared several apps on my own to examine trends but decided to prototype the screens of three competitors so that I could present them to my team.

My intention was to share insights related to 3 key topics in a brief presentation about competitor apps:

• competitor apps sign up process (particularly how many form fields they had and what kind of background information they wanted from their users)

• Structure of their apps (what were the different tabs or menu items?)

• The feelings the apps evoked for me as I experienced them for the first time (influenced by design choices)

I examined the sign up process and user flow for monitoring mental health for several competitors including Daylio, HeyPeers, and Breeze, who sought to provide parallel insights to their users. You can see how I used the screens to guide a discussion with my colleagues below.

Insights

The competitor analysis provided us with several examples of how different apps display choices for users to make in survey formats. We also saw how we might add more customization options for users in future designs. Competitors had interesting ways of displaying insights back to their users - when we analyzed this we realized the multitude of ways we could reflect the user’s progress, even with a very simple survey format. Additionally, the competitor analysis helped me feel like I understood the capacity for complexity in this market - we saw examples of highly simplified and highly customizable apps that were both successful in displaying useful information to users.

Ideation (first sketches)

Our project lead wanted us to envision different ways to incorporate a survey method into an existing app and intentionally did not share the current designs of the product with us in the beginning stages. I found that this omission forced us to consider, early on, how to make our feature compatible with existing features within a larger mental health app structure.

We worked individually for our early ideation and it was a great learning experience for me to impose my own constraints on my early designs and let myself imagine the kind of interaction I would like to have with the survey. I was able to incorporate the knowledge I’d gotten from my literature review and competitive analysis to provide context for my design choices in the critique with my team afterwards. You can see some of my early concepts in the sketches below.

Feature Prioritization

At this point we were, as a team, very excited about all the possibilities with the survey feature of the app. It was necessary for us to take a pause and narrow our focus to what we wanted for our first version of the new feature. I created a document for us to contribute to collaboratively, as I’d been making notes about how designs would be affected by the realities of the existing app.

At this point our project lead demonstrated the existing app and allowed us to ask questions and brainstorm together about how to fit our feature in. We agreed to keep more out-of-scope design ideas in our back pockets but to move forward with the simplest design possible moving forward, so we could present our MVP to stakeholders before investing too much time.

Card Sort

One of the challenges of the project was that we needed to agree on a certain amount of categories for several options that we presented to our users to select from. I felt it was my job as the UX Researcher with a background in social work to advocate for the diversity of human experience. Although we were looking for a simplified design that would not cause the user to think longer than a few seconds about their answers, I offered the counterpoint that users may hesitate to fit their daily experiences into broad categories prescribed by others.

I asked my team if I could borrow their time for a short card sort activity. If four of us could agree on the “must haves” for each category type, I would know our design choices were a bit more justified. The card sort produced such a rich conversation because we found that our daily experiences varied so much more from what we originally thought. For example, one of us wanted to include “neighbors” into a social category because he grew up in a culture much different from the American team members who hardly spoke to the people who lived in the same neighborhood.

As a direct result of the card sort activity I advocated for and designed, we ended up moving from 6 categories to a minimum of 8 to be displayed to users on each page.

You can see some images from the card-sorting activity below.

Iteration Review

We modified our original team design several time in collaborative sessions but also using sticky notes and providing feedback through Slack and email. Our project lead was able to answer questions about the service delivery of the app and its intended audience. We planned to work on user personas, user journey maps, and ecosystem maps after this project so I made sure to save our questions as we moved forward with iterative designs.

MVP

We worked as a team to develop our designs into a simple, testable MVP that did not lose its appeal due to its unique survey feature. Often I asked my colleagues to justify their design decisions and suggested alternatives. We had constructive conversations because one of us favored simplicity, one of us favored user choice, and one of us favored an elegant visual design.

Below you can see some of our wireframes which we created collaboratively and added comments or questions with sticky notes.