Harmony Case Study

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Device: Mobile App

Course: Interactive User Experience Course Project

Purpose: Mental Health App

My Role: Product Designer and UX Researcher


My group of five product designers and researchers worked to create an app targeted towards adults suffering from mental health issues, particularly during the pandemic.

We incorporated these few elements into our design:

Journaling Feature

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Events Feature

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Modules Feature

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Profile Page

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The Process

Needfinding

Our team focused immediately on finding 1) who our users are 2) what they needed.

We focused primarily on younger adults as they are more likely to not have access/resources to get therapy and to interact with mental health apps.

After initial need-finding research, we learned that our users were:

  • Younger adults

  • People with anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders

  • People who felt isolated during the pandemic

Their current issues regarding mental health were:

  • Feelings of isolation due to not being able to interact with others

  • Having no one to speak with who would understand their issues

  • Lack of resources to get therapy and professional help

  • Trouble managing stress, emotions, and anxiety from school

They expressed the need for:

  • Social interaction with others who were experiencing similar issues

  • Strategies to deal with mental health issues (because many didn’t have the resources to get therapy)

  • Ways to track their emotions

Brainstorming

Storyboards:

We created storyboards to gauge the user interaction with the app and the potential benefit it would serve, focusing on the social interaction aspect.

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Initial Brainstorming:

We listed out a list of ideas for features, aesthetic, further research, interactions, and general concepts. We listed out a select few of these concepts onto a priority matrix.

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Initial Concepts:

We came up with several design concepts based off of the highest cards in the priority matrix, focusing on the general interaction style.

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Paper Prototypes:

We created simple paper prototypes for initial user testing.

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After initial brainstorming, we figured that:

  • Negativity and misinformation is prominent in social forums (which we had originally considered)

  • Many needfinding participants had mentioned that the toxicity of social media could be harmful to their mental health, so we had to steer away from the social media style app we had originally considered and limit the level of user interaction

  • We had originally considered a tasks page for users to finish small tasks, however, decided against the idea as it might feel like homework

  • It might be useful to incorporate a simple mood setting feature within the journaling page so that users can track their feelings while reflecting on their day

  • Keeping guided online events would be beneficial for social interaction without giving people the space to spread misinformation

  • We wanted a calming atmosphere to the app as it was meant to help users who might be feeling stressed

Low-Fidelity Mockups

We created low-fidelity mockups to convey ideas of what the features we finalized on might look like and then iterated on these mockups while simultaneously conducting user testing. This helped us to quickly make iterations based on what users wanted to see from the app and what they disliked.

We considered the user needs and brought these main solutions to address them:

  • The events page covers the need for social interaction with those who experience similar issues WITHOUT giving users a space to spread misinformation and toxicity. These events are centered around self-care and mental health (yoga, meditation, etc.) and are easy for users to do from the comfort of their homes as they are online events.

  • Users noted a need for strategies to deal with mental health issues. Thus, we incorporated a modules feature that has curated content from mental health care professionals that addresses ways to acknowledge, understand, and cope with issues such as depression and anxiety.

  • Users wanted a way to track their emotions. We have a mood tracking feature that allows users to set how they felt during the morning, afternoon, and evening. They can also see a chart of how their moods changed throughout the week. The journaling feature also helps with this need as it allows users to get reflect upon their day/week and get specific about their feelings.

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Changes between iterations:

We made several changes between iterations including:

  • Removal of public journals because users stated that they might not utilize this feature because of privacy issues and not having a desire to publicize their thoughts

  • Adding a journal home page (so that users can have more than one journal and some users mentioned that it’s intimidating to jump right into a journal immediately)

  • Originally we had users take a quiz first and then get to access the modules (which were curated based off of the quiz) but we decided to instead have the quiz be optional and have all users access to the entire library of content. The quiz, when taken, will curate specific modules that might be more beneficial to users that will be seen in the recommended section.

  • We added a moods chart so that users can see the change in their moods throughout the week.

  • Whatever moods the user set that day can be seen on the journal page for that day. This is because many users felt that it was difficult to start journaling because they don’t know where to begin. Thus, the moods feature allows them to recall what they felt throughout that day and get started from there.

  • As previously mentioned, some users felt intimidated by journaling because they didn’t know what to write. So, we created a prompts section where users could find new prompts every day. These prompts are general and reflection-oriented (e.g. “What did you accomplish today”, “What was a moment you felt content or excited today”)

Final Usability Testing:

We conducted a final round of usability testing with 11 users, testing whether users were able to complete tasks, how long it took for users to go through the tasks within each page, and what users thought of each page’s functionality.

  1. For the task completion portion, we found that the majority of users were able to complete the tasks for each page, with the exception of 3 participants who struggled to complete tasks in the journaling feature.

  2. For the task time portion, we found that users took longer to complete the events page tasks and the user profile page tasks. Users noted during testing that the filter button for the events page was confusing.

  3. Most users said they would use the app, liked the journaling, modules, and events features, and felt that the app overall was easy to navigate. On the other hand, some users noted that they didn’t like that the moods feature had few options to choose from, thought the filter button on the events page was confusing, and had other minor usability concerns.

Final Thoughts

Designing this app was a really fun and insightful experience, especially with the help of all my wonderful teammates. Mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic is a critical issue that is mentioned, yet rarely full discussed. Isolation, depression, and anxiety are now commonplace amongst younger adults and even more heightened during this stressful time. Being able to work on this app allowed me to consider where the problem arises and what solutions could be applied towards this issue.

There are, of course, several things I would want to change, however, for the three month time-period that we had for this project, I feel pretty proud of the work that we’ve done, and excited for more challenges up ahead!

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