IDONTMIND
Building a 0→1 interactive mental health mobile companion meant to be deleted.
Role
Product Designer, Contract
Timeline
Nov. 2023 - Jun. 2024
Team
4 Product Designers
10 Developers
Skills Leveraged
UX Design
Prototyping
User Research
Project Overview
IDONTMIND is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a mission to inspire open conversations about mental health and to provide free resources, education, and encouragement for anyone who needs it. Launched in 2017 by actor Chris Wood, the campaign has 147,000 followers and counting.Over the 2023-24 school year, my team at LA Blueprint developed a fully functional mobile application for IDONTMIND.
As a designer, I worked closely with the non-profit to evaluate the core needs of their organization and helped propose a feasible technical solution to be built out in less than a year. We designed the app from zero to one, along with a full-scale design system and design documentation to help ensure that the product can be sustained by the non-profit long term.
NPO CONSULTATION
Defining the problem space with our non-profit partner
Early conversations at the inception of our partnership with IDONTMIND revealed three main pressing issues:
II. THE CHALLENGE
How can we find a way for IDONTMIND to engage interactively with their community in a way that provides resources and support in a personal and empowering way?
III. COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Examining the competing mental health market
For the duration of one week, we conducted an analysis of eight mental health competitors that offer similar services. This analysis helped us identify commonalities that suggested features to incorporate in our product, as well as aspects to avoid.
IV. CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY
Let's try to understand what real potential users are looking for
To better understand the range of our audience's perspectives and experiences with mental health competitors, we interviewed four members of IDONTMIND's Youth Impact Team, who specialize in promoting mental health awareness. This is just 1/3 of our affinity board where we were able to categorize all of the data they gave us!
Once we had grouped everything together, we had three main findings:
V. USER PERSONA
Putting names and faces to our insights
To further synthesize our research findings and allow our team to more effectively empathize with our users, we created personas to humanize the various mental health needs people might have coming into the app.
VI. OUR PROPOSED SOLUTION
A mobile mental health companion app that …
VII. HOPPING INTO FIGMA
Putting pen to paper — or more like — ideas to wireframes
A peek at just a few of our low fidelity wireframes. We iterated upon hundreds of screen when balancing between visual explorations, functionality, and interaction flows. Note: This project exposed me to the world of edge cases that come along with building an app from scratch
VII. USABILITY TESTS
Understanding user behaviors and patterns
Once we finished prototyping an MVP, we shared our working prototype with six participants to see where our users may be having trouble. Interviewees cited that the new app was generally intuitive, easy-to-use, and engaging. Whilst there were some points of confusion for certain features, such as the organizational flows or unclear bits of copy, their feedback helped guide our design decisions as we iterated on our final designs.
IX. ITERATIONS
Weighing tradeoffs through the lens of our users
Rethinking the content organizational system.
Participants found the sheer amount of resources in the Content Library overwhelming, to the point where they omitted using the current organizational system entirely.
II. Having more user-centric copy throughout features.
Participants expressed that they wouldn’t always want to add their own custom titles for journal entries, and wondered what types of attachments would be supported by the journal feature.
III. Iterating on how to present functional and clear metrics.
Participants expected the iconography on the trends landing page to be tappable/interactive and difficult to adjust the time frame within the trends page.
X. DESIGN SYSTEM
Crafting a visual identity that is scalable and sustainable
One of the biggest considerations we had when making this design system was allowing future teams to easily build, adapt, and extend the app’s visual and functional components after deployment. Thus, we tried to be as detailed as possible with when and where to use components.
XI. FINAL PROTOTYPE
Introducing the IDONTMIND mobile companion!
Onboarding Flow
A welcoming process that assures users they are the ones in control and can choose to omit content that may be triggering to their specific mental health needs.
Check-In Flow
Users start with daily check-ins that algorithmically taper off as emotional regulation improves, following our finding that we want users to get off the app healthily.
Content Flow
Includes resources from IDONTMIND’s platforms, picked specifically to support, empower, and challenge the user, based on their daily check-ins and trend analyses.
Trends Flow
Displays metrics over time, allowing users to switch between short-term and long-term views, with content generated based on these trends.
XII. THANK YOU
What's next on the horizon
The IDONTMIND app is currently being deployed! With our designs and code finalized, we're working on getting our app on the Apple and Google stores. Shoutout to my AMAZING team—I couldn't have asked for a more chaotic, yet hard working group of people to make work sessions go by.
Taking the time to reflect
Think end-to-end; this was my first 0 to 1 product. It challenged me to think holistically, considering business and stakeholder impacts, as well as how the design will scale in the future.
Compromise; collaborating with developers for the first time taught me the value of adapting designs to fit project constraints, pushing me to problem-solve and adjust solutions on the spot in conjunction with feasibility.
Bring intentionality; I had to consider many tradeoffs in the creation of this product. Weighing these tradeoffs through the lens of users and their behaviors was crucial, regardless of how minute they seemed.