Mind-A-Log

My role

UX Researcher
Project Manager
Brainwriting Moderator

Roles & responsibilities

Sabine Kwan - UX Researcher, Project Manager, Brainwriting Moderator

Prabal Gupta - UI/UX Designer & Researcher

Tanya Das - UI/UX Designer

Antonella - Floater & Wireframing

My Key contributions

Competitive Analysis
Project Management
Brainwriting Moderator
Customer Journey Mapping

Tools Used

Figma, Miro

Scopes & Constraints

Finished project within 1-and-a-half days.

One of the members was from a different timezone.

All of us were relative beginners in Figma and UI/UX without any relative experience at the time.

Process

Brainstorming & Competitive Analysis

Brainstorming potential ideas we were passionate about using brainwriting, and determining what was our unique selling point by researching our competitors.

Customer Persona Crafting

Crafting out our persona and identifying our persona, Matthew's, pain points and customer journey.

Prototype Creation

Used our previous brainstormed concepts, and persona in order to create features to use for the app.

Overview

Each year, youths from the ages of 18-24 are at most risk for anxiety & depression.
1-in-3 adolescents (31.9%) will meet criteria for an anxiety disorder by the age of 18. (Child Mind Institute, Anxiety & Depression in Adolescents, childmind.org)

Youths need a support system that will help guide them through their anxiety and depression.

Journaling & Mood Tracking

According to our user interviewing results - all 3 of our user interviewees said they struggled most with routine.

Includes mood-tracking & various inputs.

Allows Matthew to:
- Recognize harmful thought patterns
- Establish order in his life (journaling & notifications)
- See progress with mood overtime.
- Uplift Matthew's mood.

Accountability Buddies

All users were interviewed during a pandemic and mentioned that isolation made them feel more distracted & anxious.

Having social support helped them decrease their anxiety.

Features: SOS Feature, Adding Accountability Buddy, Chat Features.

Pain points:
Stress reduction
Sense of companionship/lack of isolation

Consult a Psychologist

A counselor we interviewed said that in case of severe depression, psychological help is needed, thus, we decide to add the consult a psychologist feature.

All users interviewed, didn’t know what to do when they had anxiety/depression - because of a lack of resources.

Features: Viewing psychologists, booking an appointment with a psychologist, asking psychologists questions via chat feature.

Pain points:
Seeking available resources
Feeling supported
Educating oneself about one’s condition

Summary & Resolution of Pain Points

Our app addresses Matthew's pain points by:
- Uplifting Matthew’s mood by established routine in his life. (Journaling & Mood Tracking)
- Creating an accountability & support system to ensure Matthew is not alone in his struggles. (Stabilizes mood as well) &
- Giving him the appropriate resources when he needs help (Psychologists articles & Psychologists Directory.)

Step 1: Brainstorming & Competitive Analysis

In order to determine which topics our group was passionate about pursuing - we used a technique called brainwriting in which one person writes an idea, and another person further elaborates on the idea that they were interested in.

Based upon this - we discovered that our group was most passionate about the concept of mental health, , thus, we decided upon this as our main topic.

Additionally, we also researched our competitors to determine which apps were currently existing within the mental health space. Based upon our findings, we discovered, although there were lots of mental health apps generally targeted towards teenagers and adults, there were barely any apps targeted towards youth. Thus, we decided to steer the app towards this direction.

Step 2: Customer Persona Crafting

Once we decided upon our in-app features, we decided to craft our persona. At first we decided to craft personas for both the user, and the psychologist - but after much deliberation we decided to focus on the user first, as the psychologist would require another interface.

Based upon this we also created a customer journey for Matthew, which helped us to identify how our user would use our app. One of our key findings was that we should not target the app towards those who have major anxiety/depression, as that would be beyond the scope of our control. Instead users are more likely to gain access to the app through the use of a mental health professional as they are the ones who could assess whether the user's anxiety & depression is mild or major. This made us rethink about the features of the app and what features to crucially add. For instance, since our user is only on the mild spectrum in terms of anxiety, we decided to add the "consult a psychologist" option as we decided our app could only handle mild, instead of serious mental health cases.

Step 3: Prototyping

After deciding upon our user persona, we used to create a user flow & task flow for our prototype, and these steps led to the final creation of our prototype accordingly.

Outcomes & Results

Overall, we managed to complete the project on time.

Presentation took longer than expected - so it made me realize not to underestimate documenting your findings and to prepare and organize said findings in advance.

Made me determined to learn Figma more to help the team - I was really good in the creative process, and directing the team, but really bad at actually executing the design process when it came to it due to my lack of experience in Figma at the time.

The Accountability Buddy feature was one of the most discussed features, but that was generally because we as a team had difficulty implementing said features. This is because we had a discussion about notifications - and decided that a user will only be notified when a message from their accountability buddy was sent to them - other than that a user will not receive any other notifications from the app other than their self-prescribed journaling/mood tracking notifications.

Style tiles should have been further elaborated on before starting the design process to help with setting the style branding of the app before further changes need to be executed.

Mind-A-Log

Assisting troubled youth with anxiety and depression using mood trackers, self-help articles, and connecting them to professional resources.

Process

Overview

How might we make we make it easier for youths to manage their anxiety and depression?

Meet Mathew

Process

Step 1: Brainstorming & Competitive Analysis

Step 2: Customer Persona Crafting

Step 3: Prototyping

Outcomes & Results

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