The story of leora: a mental health podcast app
Why mental health?
Leora means light in greek and Hebrew. And our main goal is to shed a light on this topic.
As a person with a strong interest in mental health, it strikes me when we ask the question what
is mental health? and the responses come with doubt. Some will say that they take care of their
mental health, and some say that they do not have mental health issues. But what's in between?
A wicked question: what is mental health?
Defining what is is mental health can be quite tricky. In a comedic way, Taylor Tomlinson explains it pretty well.
According to the World Health organization is: "A state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community.". In addition, a survey made by the eurobarometer, states that "The most important factors to achieve good mental health are living conditions (60%),followed by financial security (53%), physical activity and social contact (both 41%)."
Where do we find information?
The news also talk about this on a daily basis, we are used to hearing newsrooms with headlines such as "how stress affects mental heath: from burnout to depression" or "mental health: the other deadly pandemic", or opinion articles We also have more sources of secondary research such as the World Health Organization, The European public health alliance,
Misleading information
There is a very popular way of researching information, we all use it. How common is to ask in google "how do I know if"? Whilst it can be really useful for some things, for health is a just not useful at all. Just to see I googled "How do I know if I suffer from", in a matter of milliseconds the suggested words to complete my sentence were: anxiety, depression, trauma, insomnia, ptsd, add, both anxiety and depression.
Creating leora: the story
Prologue: decisions and decisions
Due to requirements, we made two important decisions that would impact leora's design:
🔸IOS Native app: we can reach bigger and moretaste in design, usability and comfortability.
🔸Podcast content for the MVP: accessibility wise, usage of users when they are busy and allowing the users to stay within the app to make its usage easier.
Chapter 1: Defining our user
Now, we started by doing secondary research, in the diverging stage of the Ux design process. Once we had a fairly completed image, we wanted to address the primary research by doing using two methods:
🔸 Survey: we wanted to gather quantitative data about the users and how important is mental health is to them, covering users who have worked on their mental health and users who had not. To create it we used the lean survey template, to make sure that we included all the questions in the right order.
To our surprise, no one responded to have used a wellness app, so we needed to rethink about the results.
After reviewing thoroughly, we got three hypothesis:
1️⃣ Talking about mental health is still a tabu
2️⃣ There is no guarantee that the information that you find is contrasted
3️⃣ There are so many options and they lack of publicity
🔸 User interviews: we used these hypothesis to create our questions with the users. Our goals were to understand these insights and get some more qualitative information. We included from more general questions to more specific about wellness apps, to understand how the users see them. Before reaching users, we made sure it was complete and tried with colleagues.
The results were very interesting, learning about two types of user:
👩🦰 User persona 1: Have not experience mental health issues.
🧑🦱 User persona 2: Has suffered from these issues and prevents them.
To confirm, we interviewed Diana, our SME expert in mental health. As was replying we could feel relieve and assurance, because she was confirming the users feedback:
During this process, we realized that our idea of making a more traditional app didn't match with the insights, so instead we decided to think out of the box and turn it into a library for mental health resources.
Before starting to define things, we worked on the organization, calendar and tasks for the project. Using one of my favorite tools, a retro timing schedule we organized all the tasks to be done, based on:
🔸 The amount of work that they required (per hours or days)
🔸 Per importance, we prioritised the most vitals ones
🔸 The different usability and testing needed to do.
Chapter 2: Carlota, our main character
Let's introduce a new character in this story. Meet Carlota, our user persona:
Her routine:
Lately Carlota has been working extra hours due to her responsibilities. She leaves the office, and by the time she's reaching her apartment, she remembers something hat a colleague has told her, and that makes her feel upset. She tries talking to some friends, but they are not available. Instead of keep searching for someone, she decides to move past it, but there is one little problem. She can't and that will define her mood and health for the next days. That little problem grows to become a bigger problem, and this is what we worked on emotional user journey, because is a case that can happen to anyone anytime.
Tools that we've used:
To confirm our user persona, we asked ourselves lots of questions. We used two methods:
1️⃣ To complete Carlota's profile with an empathy map method
2️⃣ To confirm information and details with a how might we method
This led us to the second protagonist: the problem statement, hard to define and key to our story.
Chapter 3: Let's ideate and diverge again!
One of the thing that I like about UX is the tools and the collaborative environment. Martin and I had already clear ideas on the user flow and the main features that were a must and a should. Sketching the crazy 8ths is always an interesting process because it determines how aligned you are with your colleagues, and where the most obvious ideas or concepts come up, without being too defined.
What we didn't anticipate was our change on the essence of the app, so did some research on our direct and indirect competitors and updated our plan. Once we had these already worked out, we prioritized until we came up with a complete plan:
Chapter 4: Creating the wireframes
Before starting design, we worked on the user flow, making sure we were reflecting the learnings from research as well as Carlota's pains and needs, and mostly her goal: Carlota finding helpful and validated information to figure out her issues.
In this chapter, we have to introduce our latest character: feedback. It's key to improve the design process. As writers say when working on their novels "don't fall in love with your darlings", and frankly it is quite easy to fall in love with your design, specially when you've thought of every decision applied.
The three wireframes
After the hand sketches, we started working on the low fidelity wireframe, in which we had a clear idea of what we wanted to do, with the main musts and shoulds. Testing these first results is always interesting because the feedback is more general and reassures or helps define the structure.
What we needed to adjust was:
🔸 Users want to see their progress
🔸 Users want to save things to watch later
🔸 Users felt there was too much information in the homepage
The second version, the mid fidelity wireframe, contained more information of the specific elements that were included in each screen. The feedback provided in usability tests can give you hints of the user behavior and the user's interest in the app features, highlight the main elements.
What we learned with the usability testing was that overall the app was heading there right direction, with some details to fix:
🔸 Some buttons were not entirely clear or obvious
🔸 Adding a definition with a visual element is always important
🔸 The main page is important, so it needs to be understood within 5 seconds
🔸 Make sure that the elements are clear (CRAP and Gestalt principles)
Once applied all these changes, we worked on the high fidelity wireframe, in which we made the following general decisions, such as taking into account the style guide and the mood board.
🔸 Application of certain IOS conventions of the IOS Design kit (newsfeed, titles and spacing between lines)
🔸 The final colours of the app to make sure it aligned with our goals
🔸 The white space in most of the screens
More specifically, these were all the decisions that we made:
Chapter 5: Feedback again!
We are now reaching the end of this story, and feedback comes back into action.
We worked on two different methods of testing: more usability testing as well as desirability testing.
We asked 36 users to describe the app designed in 5 words. We were secretly hoping to read words such as "useful", "easy to use" or "pleasant", and we actually did. The exact words were: usable, intuitive, efficient, easy to use and attractive. Music to our ears! 😍
Still, we chose to contrast it with more usability testings, which I've learnt to enjoy, and these are the highlights:
🔸 5 out of 5 users said it was clear and intuitive
🔸 Some design work to be adjusted with the colour consistency
🔸 Some confusions with the library part.
Chapter 6: Moral of the story
This project has been he most interesting for me and the one I've enjoyed the most. I've worked aligned with my colleague Martin and we've discuss every need we had.
These are our next steps:
🔸 Do more usability testing to continue improving the IOS version
🔸 Include videos format
🔸 Work on the android version of the app
The most important things that we learned:
🔸 When you are not sure about a detail, always check on research and link to it.
🔸 About apps with content: when you are designing UI elements, always bear in mind the content is important
🔸 When working on usability testing, prepare it in advance, review the tasks carefully before meeting the users
🔸 With the feedback provided by the users, always reason if that aligns with your goals and works in your design
🔸 When you are stuck with a decision, use dot voting and reason out loud.
Just in case you want to know more...
These are other tools that we used!
Now, if you have arrived this far, first of all many thanks! 😍
It's always hard to summarize a month's work in 7 minutes, so I practiced economy of words and image. Here you can access other tools we used:
Thank you for reading! Feel free to comment or give feedback!
