MoodyGoals
End-to-end mental health mobile app
Project overview
MoodyGoals is created with a mission that promotes a healthy lifestyle to young people while establishing positive coping mechanisms to help them over stress and manage their life better.
Timeline
4 weeks
Tools
Figma
Maze
Miro
ProCreate
My roles
UX Researcher
UX Designer
Brand Designer
Understand the problem
In the United States, about 20% of all teens experience depression before they reach adulthood and only 30% of depressed teens are being treated for it. In other words, in every 10 teenagers, there are around 2 individuals who have mental health and there is a slim chance that either of them will be treated. Seeing these data has awakened me that how mental health, especially in young adults, is not considered and treated seriously.
Top causes of stress in teenagers & young adults
School
Family
Relationships
Appearance
How coping mechanism works
Coping mechanisms are the strategies people often use in the face of stress and/or trauma to help manage painful or difficult emotions. There are 2 focuses on coping mechanisms:
Emotion-focused mechanisms can help people handle any feelings of distress that result from the problem.
Problem-focused coping strategies are typically associated with methods of dealing with the problem in order to reduce stress
How can I help teenagers and young adults cope with stress and become more resilient?
Our competitors
All of our competitive apps are subscription-based. They apply different core practices for their apps. HeadSpace focuses on meditation while Reflectly uses journaling and MindDoc offers therapy sessions through BetterHelp.
What they have done well:
Each app picks a core practice and then focuses on developing strongly on 1-2 main features that encourage the users to apply that practice daily.
User-friendly and visually appealing design
Feature mood/stress level tracking
However, most of the mental health apps on the market only offer emotion-focused strategies which help users deal with the emotion after the stress is triggered, but none of them targets the problems and helps users find the solutions. It has opened an opportunity for MoodyGoals to join the market.
“In general, problem-focused coping is best, as it removes the stressor, so deals with the root cause of the problem, providing a long-term solution.” - simplypsychology.org
Who are the users?
Our target audiences are
Teenagers from 15 to 19 years old
Young adults under 25
High school students
Freshman and sophomore students in college
Young people who have lack of finance to afford their treatments/ therapy and counseling sessions
Why them?
According to NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of SMI, Serious Mental Illness, (9.7%) compared to adults aged 26-49 years (6.9%) and aged 50 and older (3.4%). In addition, this age group is more likely to experience mood swings than others due to changes in hormones and their body.
User interviews
To be able to portray the profile of our ideal users above, I scheduled interviews with 4 college and high school students to learn deeper about them and how they cope with stress. We went over some demographic questions like their ages, education, family background, and their lifestyle. I then asked them about what triggers their negative emotions the most and an example of a time when they experienced those feelings. They also shared about their coping mechanism and what they usually do to maintain a healthy mind.
Affinity map that synthesizes my findings
Their pain points
Struggling with school-life balance
Pressures from parents, school, peers, and sometimes themselves
Lack of access to resources
Not having enough time to have a social life
Not able to afford special treatments and therapy
Afraid of sharing their problems with other people
Skeptical about the mental health apps
Field Study
I asked one of my participants who is a freshman in college about how she normally keeps track of what she needs to do. Because I couldn’t physically go to her room, she took me a photo of her sticky notes.
I then asked her how she organizes the hierarchy of each item on the notes; she said the top priority would go on top and the least go at the bottom. She likes sticky notes because it’s handy and convenient.
But it doesn’t work all the time because
She doesn’t follow what she has written on sticky notes all the time and keeps procrastinating on the tasks she has set up for herself.
She can’t carry sticky notes everywhere so she is only reminded whenever she’s in her room.
It’s not linear between the top and less important tasks on a note
My first step in the ideate stage is creating a user journey mapping based on my research findings and my visions for this app. This mapping helped me discover what were some potential frustrations that users could encounter during their in-app experience.
This journey is from one of our personas, Matthew, the college student who is trying to ace all the exams while carrying 2 part-time jobs and volunteer activities. He uses MoodyGoals with the hope that it could help him stay on top of his goals and deal with stress.
For the first-time user like Matthew, I discover that the first impression is very important so a long onboarding process could discourage them to explore the apps. The flow also has to be simple and straightforward so they can set up their goals quickly without going through many steps.
Another concern for young users is the cost. Most mental health apps are not free so cost-effective is also one of my main criteria when designing for teenagers and young adults.
User Journey Mapping
Key findings
100% of participants said they feel better when school is over.
The pressure of “trying to be good at everything” is an indirect stress cause.
They are all struggling with school-life balance. They try to take on many things at the same time and don’t know how to say No.
Teenage girls experience mood swings due to periods. They usually become aggressive and overly sensitive at this time so they need something to calm them down.
What they feel:
- want to give up everything
- don’t know what to do next
- feel like they are not good enough
- their hard work is not being recognized
What they need:
- a safe place to share their problems
- a more efficient way to remind them what need to do and how to prioritize tasks
- gain self-confidence and understand their values
- help them stay away from negative thoughts
My solutions
MoodyGoals helps young adults establish a mixed positive coping mechanism between problem-focused and emotional-focused strategies to get rid of avoiding habits while gaining life-management skills.
What the app can offer
Weekly goals where users can create their weekly plan and determine the level of importance of each goal
Solution-focused method will suggest users do a small task after each mood check-in in order to either enhance their happiness or relieve their tensed emotion
Daily activities like meditation and a mini task introduce users to different stress-relieving practices and encourage them to do at least one positive thing a day
Mood-tracking tool where users can keep track and journal their moods.
From sketches
to wireframes
I created mid-fidelity wireframes to test my user flows as early as possible to discover initial issues. In this test, I paid close attention to how quickly and easily the users can locate the information without colors and icons.
Usability Testing
Task 1: Mood check-in
Task 2: Add a goal
I ran 2 moderated remote usability tests using Maze and gathered key common feedback from 10 participants for the first round and 6 participants from the second round. They were asked to complete a mood check-in and adding a goal from the home screen.
Testing early with the mid-fi version enabled me to discover indirect paths that users prefer to take to complete their tasks and foreseen some early usability issues. I was also able to see how users would respond to items they can interact with and whether it is actually necessary to include in the final version.
Some complaints and observations that I got from the first testing:
The users had a hard time starting their mission because they didn’t what to look at first
Most users took the indirect path which I didn’t expect they would
The big button in the middle is unnecessary and causes confusion
They expect that they could set up notifications/reminders for goals
The least priority goals should have a check mark like other categories
Iterations for high-fidelity prototype testing
Taking away the feedback from the first test, I made the iterations when designing the high-fidelity interface.
HOMEPAGE
Reduce the eye movement and eliminate the confusing button: My assumption for the big (+) button was it would help them easier to take action; however, it wasn’t what I expected - the users found that it was confusing to them. In the iterations, I removed the button and moved the weekly mood check-in under the Recent Journal to reduce eye movement.
Icon for mood tracking page: The expected path for mood check-in should be done from the homepage but 80% of the participants clicked the fruit icon which was for the Stats page to check their mood. The icon was unclear and misled the users so I changed it.
Remove unwanted function: Chatbox was my first idea to help young people support each other through online communication; however, it was risky to let teenagers talk to strangers, especially when their moods are mostly unstable. There could be consequences where the conversations are not supportive as I expect so I replace that function with Profile.
GOALS PAGE
Reminders: I added a reminder/notification button based on the suggestion of my users. They would like to be reminded outside of the app and have control of how they would want to set up the notifications.
Add-a-goal button is bigger and clearer than in the mid-fi version. It’s intentional to leave the button at the bottom because I want the users every time they add a new goal, they will need to review all the existing goals first to avoid overwhelming themselves by setting things up that they cannot finish.
Goal recommendations: in case the users don’t know what are good goals for them, the app will suggest to them a couple of good things, like going to bed early or exploring something new.
The least-priority goals are optional and not urgent so I didn’t put the checkmark in the mid-fi version, but then I realize that, for consistency, the least important goals could still be counted towards the users’ Monthly Report in Stats page if they are able to finish them.
Final design with iterations from the second testing
After implementing priority changes in the prototype, I ran the second test and collected 12 responses. The feedback is mostly positive with some minor suggestions on how the UI could be better.
Here are the final designs after the second iteration.
Hey, how was your day?
Mood check-in allows users to take notes on their feeling at the end of the day and select the reason that makes them feel that way. Depending on their response, the app will suggest some problem-focused activities to distract them from negative feelings and help them see the opportunities through the problem. From then, they can choose whether they want to make it a new goal for the week or not.
Manage your life better
by organizing what needs to be done in a week. Through this feature, I want to promote the idea that we don’t have to do everything at the same time, instead, let’s focus on the high-priority ones before heading out for a wonderful weekend.
Small efforts, big impacts
There are 24 hours a day so why don’t we spend 10 to 30 minutes taking care of our mental health?
MoodyGoals encourages users to take a short meditation and do at least one positive thing daily to help freshen their minds. These activities are low effort but would be helpful in the long term.
Product Branding
MoodyGoals uses the unique fruity theme with a natural color palette like yellow, orange, and green to bring positive energy and fun to young users. All the icons and graphics are exclusively designed by me for this app
Dependencies
MoodyGoals is a lifestyle app, not healthcare. If users have severe symptoms like depression, seeing professionals is still the best approach.
Users’ conditions still depend largely on external factors like family, community, etc. Only users can determine if this problem-focused method works for them or not.
It requires a long-term and consistent daily effort to be able to see the results.
Success metrics
MoodyGoals’ effectiveness can be measured by how often and how consistent users open the app to take action. If people stop using it after the first few tries, then I will need to find out why that happens. If the usage frequency is getting less than usual after a while, I can understand that users are already familiar with the practices and they can do it by themselves without the app.
How to measure the success of MoodyGoals?
Takeaways
Challenges
Since there are a lot of mental health apps on the market, I had to keep in mind what could be the strongest selling point for MoodyGoals. I’m not designing the same app with a different UI, I’m going to suggest a better solution - and only users can determine if it’s really better for them. Designing a product for a young group of people like teenagers needs to be more careful and considered different aspects like cost, parent consent, sensitive content, potential consequences, graphics use, and more. I came up with many different ideas, but in the end, I had to eliminate some and only keep the key features.
Next steps
- Develop the reminder-setting page
- Revise the colors on the home screen to show the informational hierarchy better
- Expand the suggested activities for different feelings and categories
- Continue testing with users
- Accountability feature: some research shows that people would be more likely to achieve their goals if they have an accountability buddy. This could be something that MoodyGoals can develop in the next steps.