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Millennials and younger generations are experiencing higher levels of anxiety and depression more than any other previous generation and most do not seek help.
As someone who has suffered from severe anxiety in the past and seeing some of my friends dealing with it in destructive ways, I decided to go on a mission to learn and come up with something that could help.
Is to help people work through their anxiety in the moment as well as providing accurate and reliable information. A metric for success is to have people to seek professional help from a counselor and be able to communicate their thoughts and feelings better.
This is a personal project where I was able to do all of the ux/ui design.
Roles: UX/UI Design
Key Skills: User Researcher, UX Design and Visual Design
Tools: Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator
Duration: 8 Weeks
I interviewed and surveyed 4 people that suffered from various levels of anxiety about their struggles, how they attempted to cope with it, and if they ever sought out professional help.
After reviewing the data I collected during this research phase I realized several things:
Based on the information I received from the interviews I wanted to focus on something that could give them relevant and accurate information and be with them in their times of need.
I created these personas of what potential users for the product could look like based on the interview data that I had gathered along with other research and some of my own experiences with severe anxiety.
Age: 23
Occupation: Marketing
Location: Los Angeles
Tier: First Time User
Archetype: Outgoing and Sociable
Alexa is in her final year of college. She is majoring in business and marketing and already has a marketing internship with the possibility of turning into full-time work. Lately, she has been under a lot of stress between her internship and schooling. So much that she’s been experiencing extreme levels of anxiety and has even started having panic attacks. She does not know what is going on and what to do since she has never experienced this before.
Age: 28
Occupation: Software Engineer
Location: Seattle
Tier: Late Adopter
Archetype: Reserved
Felix is a software engineer he has a good job and has been at his company for several years. He enjoys his work and is friends with all of his colleagues. Though he suffers from severe social anxiety that makes it hard for him to go out and meet new people. This has caused him to become lonely and he has turned to self-medicating with alcohol and CBD. He doesn’t want to seek professional help and thinks he can get better on his own.
These are the percentages of men and women who have experienced an anxiety disorder in the past 10 years.
This shows how many individuals seek professional help out of all who suffer from some sort of anxiety disorder.
63.1% With anxiety disorders who don’t seek treatment
I still needed to understand the problem better to achieve the goal of this project. I did more research and also met with a professional counselor to further understand the issue from a professional standpoint. I also wanted to see if cellphone usage maybe was the cause of this increase in anxiety.
Could cellphones be the cause of this spike in anxiety? How often did people seek out help?
These are some of my findings I came across during my research:
After finally gathering enough information I felt that I could start off trying to come up with a solution. For the goals that I felt were important for this product to meet and from the information that I had gathered, I felt that a mobile app would be the best medium for this. I started off by creating sketches for an application called MindCare.
The application is meant to teach users how to talk through their emotions so they can talk themselves down and also learn how to communicate with a professional on what they feel. It is also going to give relevant and up to date information as well as providing perspective and encouraging them to seek help.
These are the features that would accomplish these goals:
Some of these wireframes were revised again. Features like the ability to talk to a live counselor were cut because of time constraints, also to keep the focus on core functions. The function to allow the user to show and hid the app navigation via a small pull tab at the bottom right of the screen was implemented here in this phase.
I cleaned up the wireframes and created some high fidelity mockups of the final features a prototype was also created in Adobe XD.
The final design has three main features:
1. My Journal
2. Chat
3. The Article Library
It is a handy feature where users can log how they are feeling daily. This will help create a perspective on how they are doing over a long period. It is too easy to get lost in the moment of how you are feeling that you lose sight of the greater picture.
Here they can get insight on if they are improving or getting worse over weeks, months, or years. This is also designed to be used while going to a counselor. So that they can more effectively help the user and get a better idea of what is working and what is not.
This feature gives the user the ability to chat with someone who isn’t a real person. This would be a chatbot that is programmed with all of the latest proven techniques in helping someone work through their anxiety.
Overtime the bot will help teach people to be more comfortable with opening up communicating their feelings and thoughts to real people and professionals that they trust.
The idea behind this feature is to provide users with relevant, current, accurate information, and exercises. This section will be tailored to the user's needs through their responses and interactions within the MindCare application.
The purpose of this is to help prevent people from jumping straight to Google and looking up inaccurate or outdated information. It will give them the information that is helpful to their specific needs and will recommend trusted places outside of the app.
Perspective is a really important feature of this app. It takes all of a users interactions and entries and displays how their mood was over an extended period of time. This helps them know where they are at in the big picture. It is easy to get lost in a single day or moment and feel like its always like that. So this is to help them stay on the path to improving.
Counselors can also use this feature to help see how the person is doing. They can reflect on the journal entries and talk through them and adjust their meetings accordingly.
I would like to further develop this project in the future into something that is a releasable product. This was a challenging project and I learned a lot about using data to help define and enforce the features of the project. It is interesting how it can point you in a direction you would not have considered beforehand.
Knowing what I know now I would like to further develop the visual systems of this project and consider accessibility features that would allow for more people to be able to use the app.