MindBud
Product Design
Intelligently helping people grow and connect with peers
Duration
10 weeks
Role
Product Designer,
SEO Strategist
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Miro
iMovie
Problem
Due to current societal trends and the impact of the pandemic, the amount of people affected by mental health issues has only been increasing. However, since mental health conditions are complicated by unique personal experiences and various levels of severities, it makes it difficult for people to find resources that matches personal needs without barriers such as outside judgments and lack of people who truly resonate with their conditions.
Background
Currently factors such as high-cost of mental health treatments, lack of understanding within society, rise of telehealth, providing opportunities for technology-based forms of mental health support.
With this trend analysis in mind, we conducted further research to explore the needs and barriers of mental health patients when they seek technology-based forms of support, as well as their general help-seeking behavior.
See prototype
Research
Survey
We then devised a survey and distributed it to multiple mental health online forums, including Reddit, Discord, and Facebook. The following key insights directed our next-step direction:
Safety
Stakeholders generally mention safety concerns when seeking online mental health help and emphasize that it is difficult to build trusted and stable relationships with others online.
Affordability
Stigma
Affordability of mental health resources is one of the biggest needs & desires.
Stigma (being viewed as weak & being judged) is one of biggest barriers preventing people from seeking out help, especially for males.
To target these three major topics, we brainstormed and created the following storyboards to try and mimic the problem scenarios and their potential solutions
Interviews
To probe specific pain points from these topics, we then conducted one-to-one interviews to first understand their perspectives in depth, and secondly to receive feedback on our ideas in forms of storyboards. From the seven interviews, we selected the following storyboards:
AI Chatbot Assistance to Create a Judgement-Free Environment
6 out of 7 interviewees supported our solution of using an AI chatbot to create a judgment-free environment. We noted similarities between their reactions in which they felt leveraging AI would create a sense of safety, acceptance, and even understanding.
As one interviewee said,
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“It creates a safe space for people to explore what they want to do. The biggest thing is feeling safe and having the freedom to explore.”
Interactive Mental Health Education Lessons
6 out of 7 interviewees support these solutions because they would encourage others to provide more informed support and normalize mental health conditions.
“More exposure, more normalization.”
Testing
Landing Page AB Testing
After analyzing the interview transcripts, we decoded the following common themes. Combining with the above selected storyboards, we ideate a solution structure:
​We found an opportunity to pivot and combine AI, education, and community because both our AI idea and a community feature have the potential to meet the needs of our stakeholders, where AI would be utilized as a non-judgmental assistant for education and bond-building.
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One question thus raises:
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Would mental health patients be comfortable using an app that both serves as a personal space (education) to learn about mental health and as a social space (community) to connect with others?
We wanted to understand if our competitors only offered education because people preferred to separate personal and social services.To explore this, we tested two service ideas:
AI + Education vs. AI + Education + Community
Through Google Adwords web probes, we found that the AI + Education + Community landing page actually has a much higher conversion rate when accounting for the conversions generated by ads alone, meaning our riskiest and unique selling point has promise and we will thus focus on this concept.
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Concierge MVP Testing
Next, we conducted MVP testing with two early adopters to test the AI + education + community idea with the following questions and a minimum viable prototype:
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What do people think about interacting with an AI? How comfortable they are with opening up to the AI?
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What do they think about getting matched with others using AI?
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How comfortable they are with talking to others they’ve just met?
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What do they think about AI-facilitated lessons?
“I liked that, I feel like it’s a simple idea but it has a strong possible, outcomes that could come from it.”
According to the testing results, we refined our core features such as specifying interests in the friend-matching feature, adding gamification in the interactive lessons to improve motivation etc.
Solution
Finally, after MVP iterations and final competitive analysis & value flow analysis, we designed our app MindBud with four major features:
Takeaways
Designing for a group like the mental health community requires extensive research, a range of toolsets to help deal with the pre-existing conditions, and an empathetic and attentive heart for others. It pushes me to abandon my predispositions and really re-examine and reconsider the group, their difficulties, and how we could really help them with a combination of people and technology approaches.
Credit to my teammates: Marmot Bao. Tong Yuan