Finding peace and purpose in times of uncertainty
Therapy should be for everyone—but not everyone can afford or easily access it
DURATION
3 weeks
TEAM
3 UX Designers
MY ROLE
Co-led design team throughout entire design process; research, ideation, and iteration
Helped facilitate conversations between the team and key stakeholders
TOOLS
Pen and paper
Figma
DELIVERABLES
Feature roadmap
Style guide
High-fidelity wireframes
High-fidelity prototype
O V E R V I E W
Take ACTion is an iOS wellness application that we created for our client, a licensed clinical psychologist, whose mission is to empower others and heal hearts and minds. The initial goal was to develop an app that would focus on personal values, journaling, meditation, and goal-setting, using the ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) approach.
However, we ended up with something that was a bit different than what our client originally had in mind… 🤔
G O A L
Help people resolve emotional problems and/or break unhealthy patterns
T H E C H A L L E N G E
Outside of therapy, patients may lack structure, guidance, or self-discipline for how to resolve their emotional problems and/or break unhealthy patterns.
How might we help people build and maintain healthy behaviors?
T H E S O L U T I O N
By providing strong human connections, accountability measures, and positive reinforcement, then people will have the additional support needed to resolve emotional problems and break unhealthy patterns.
✨ Solution ✨
Accountability buddy
Able to invite friends to join the app
Connect with an accountability buddy based on similar goals and interests
Send and receive appropriate messages of encouragement or praise based on user progress
View each others’ progress to stay on track of goals
Positive reinforcement
Rewards system through stamp card
Encouragement or praise from accountability buddy
Gamification through rewards system and progress indicators
Strong human connections
Community stories from members sharing their mental health journeys
Connect with like-minded individuals for support
Is simply creating another wellness app the answer?
To understand what was currently working on the market, we conducted competitive and comparative analysis. The top grossing and downloaded mindfulness apps worldwide were: Headspace and Calm.
The main features that these two apps both provide are:
Guided meditations
Podcasts and music to help with sleep and anxiety
Daily mindfulness tips and reminders
Our initial assumption was wrong.
We interviewed 12 therapists, therapy consumers, and wellness app users. Surprisingly, none of them expressed a strong interest in journaling, meditation, or goal setting.
After we synthesized our qualitative data gathered from the user interviews, we discovered that people expressed:
Preference for strong human connections
Emphasis on accountability measures to help complete tasks / goals
Inclined to be around positive reinforcement
Designing for mindfulness
Our initial concept ideas focused on the onboarding, journaling, goal setting, and meditation features. However, based on our research and feature prioritization, the final solution shifted to provide strong human connections, an accountability buddy feature, and positive reinforcement methods.
We conducted usability tests on five participants:
“Onboarding was a bit too fast…”
“I don’t know the intent of adding a friend. Is this someone we’re adding to join us in the journey, or someone I’m confiding secrets in?”
“I would be more inclined to reach out to the app’s community rather than my own personal friends.”
“Too many icons; need more text to support.”
“I want to see the progress of my accountability buddy. If I can’t see it, then what’s the point?”
Next steps: a feature roadmap
We handed off our client with a feature roadmap of possible features to come. While curated content, scaling out to marginalized communities, and engaging in a team of licensed therapists was important, we made it clear that it was equally important to establish Take ACTion’s branding and recruit additional resources to further develop this product. If we had more time, we would conduct usability tests on our final solution to determine our final solution’s effect.
Reflections
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford
With the limited budget and resources we had to work with, we had to hone in on the MVP to optimize all of our time and efforts. Clients come to us for our professionalism and expertise to help them solve an issue. It is our duty to make sure we are designing the right thing, before designing the thing right.
It’s important to work towards a common end goal.
I’ve learned how to work in a team with different communication and work styles. I love leveraging the strengths of everyone to produce a strong and impactful outcome. With different individuals within a team comes many great ideas. A lot of hard work was put into Take ACTion and I am pleased to say that our client was extremely impressed and excited with our final outcome!
I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for Take ACTion. 🌱🙏🏼✨
