Ami
UI/UX Design and Research
Timeline: January 2020 - May 2020
Team: Yashvi Tibrewal, Sophie Callaway, and Michelle Kim
Role: UX Designer and Researcher
A special thanks to: Blessing Yen, for teaching my first foray into product design.
Access to mental health resources and treatment on college campuses has become extremely difficult. These departments are understaffed, it’s hard to schedule effective sessions and external referrals can lead to distressing and unreliable pairings.
However, what about those that are able to see a therapist? In conducting user research into our problem space, we discovered that many college students are seeing (or had been seeing) therapists and still felt that they were not receiving successful and effective treatment.
The Initial Problem
For high and low-risk college students, navigating dozens of external referrals within one’s insurance network is time-consuming and mentally overwhelming. This leads to many students not receiving the personalized care they need.
Market Research
In order to understand the current landscape for digital mental health products, my team and I conducted a competitive analysis by creating a competitive matrix. By analyzing the market for mental health apps, we discovered that current mental solutions fall under three primary categories:
Self-management of mental health (meditation, self-care, journaling, etc.)
Connecting to specialists digitally (video calls, hotlines, texting)
Building support communities
User Research
After completing our market research, we looked into completing design research by conducting one-on-one interviews and focus groups. We conducted a total of five one-on-one interviews and one hour-long focus group. Some key insights I received from these research methodologies included:
“I feel like I’m not getting the most out of therapy. I’m so mentally exhausted after classes that sometimes I don’t know what to talk about. I wish I had more guidance.”
“I don’t want to burden my friends, but sometimes when I feel depressed, I don’t know what to do and can’t wait until my appointment next week to talk about it. I’m scared to overwhelm people.”
“I can only get access to therapy if I’m classified as ‘high risk,’ but I just want to be able to know how I’m doing before I’m too incapacitated to help myself.”
User Personas
These interviews and focus groups allowed us to better understand how various users deal with mental health in college environments and some of the pitfalls they run into when in therapy. Our team decided to create two user personas that reflected these students so we can pinpoint who we are specifically designing for in the design process.
Our primary user persona is Emily Lou, a young adult in college who’s been to therapy before, but had a detrimentally bad first experience and has struggled with anxiety and depression for the past 4-5 years.
Our secondary user is Sam Douglas, a young adult who’s never been to therapy before but wants to start because he’s struggled with mental health because of how much he’s internalized his emotions and tried managing them independently. Because of this, he wants to finally take action and start now.
User Journey
After creating these user personas, we divided right into creating our user journey. Our user journey consisted of tracking the specific pain points where college students first struggled with mental health issues, places where they had to schedule therapy appointments through multiple calls, and finally being placed in contact with the care he or she needs. Our goals consisted of being able to control anxious and depressive thoughts, improve productivity and emotional well-being, and have a clear treatment plan that can be accessed at any time.
However, due to barriers put in place by the USC Administration’s PR Department and Health Center, we couldn’t get in touch with school-based therapists and the health staff, so we went back and reexamined our past research and identified a new area that was just as prominent and would allow us to create accessible impact in the mental health space. As much as people were having issues with gaining access to therapy, once they did gain access, therapy felt ineffective. So we workshopped our problem statement to reflect this new angle we were tackling.
The Redefined Problem
Overwhelmed college students do not feel equipped to have important conversations about their mental health in therapy. This leads many students to be unsuccessful in therapy, or not seek it at all.
By targeting this specific problem, we are still designing for the same user groups and personas that we researched before, but we are approaching the problem from a different angle. This made the key moment for us to design the moments of strong emotion between therapy appointments. This gave us the opportunity to build an app for students to help them become more successful in therapy.
Ideation
In order to come up with potential solutions, my team and I did the Crazy 8’s exercise to sketch a solution set. We then laid out and shared our solution sets and voted for specific features that we liked.
Sitemapping and Low-Fidelity Wireframing
I utilized Whimsical and created a sitemap and low-fidelity wireframes to lay out the groundwork for the features we selected.
Design System and Color Palette
Prior to creating our high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes, my team and I established our design system and color palette using a series of calm and warm brand colors, color proportions, and tints and tones that ooze a sense of optimism and peace.
High-Fidelity Wireframes
For our high-fidelity wireframes, my team and I decided to incorporate and design the following features into the first prototype.
View the full wireframes and prototype here.
DAILY CHECK-IN
Users can log and record their emotional and physical well-being, which can be sent to their therapist for review.
MANAGE APPOINTMENTS
Users can book, manage and track all of their appointments with therapists.
GAIN TOOLS
If users are feeling extreme emotions, they can perform therapeutic exercises to guide themselves through these feelings or moments.
JOURNAL
Users can write any private thoughts and moments by journaling right in the app. The user can also choose to send these entries to their their own therapists as well.
REVIEW PAST ENTRIES
Users can review any of their past journal entries and exercises in the history portion of Ami.
GAIN INSIGHTS
The app also gathers quantitative and qualitative data from daily check-ins, exercises and journal entries to forecast trends. Users can send these reports to their therapists.
User Testing
After designing our wireframes and prototype, I reached out to specific user archetypes to receive feedback and critiques on how we could better improve user flows. My team and I gathered six students of various backgrounds to do these user tests, which included:
A creative student who had successful therapy for anxiety and ADHD
A musician who had a negative experience with on-campus therapy
A hustler with a strong growth mindset who had an unsuccessful and inconvenient therapy experience
An impulsive and sleep-deprived student who believes that therapy will not provide any actionable solutions
A female student who studies Computer Science at UC Berkeley who has had no therapy due to negative experiences with health care
Insights
Below are some of the feedback and critiques that we received from our user tests pertaining to the app’s functionalities, interactions, and visual communication of information.
Going Forward
Due to the time constraints of the design sprint and course, we ended our design project here. Based on the feedback that we received from user tests, these would be the following changes I would implement to the Ami app if we were to go forward with it:
Changing sliders to emoji-based buttons
Change the “discover” tab name to something more representative of journaling
Make iconography, especially on the history page, clearer
Make therapist tag easier in booking appointments; make information easier to check for the user
