MindLink

Overview:

🗒 Project Overview: MindLink is a mobile app that aims to connect users to personalised mental health resources, depending on their mental health relationships and struggles.

🙁 Problem: Those struggling with mental ill-health concerns can often find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of resources out there, which may not be applicable to their personal needs, further impacting their drive/motivation to find suitable coping mechanisms and help.

🎯 Solution: A platform which showcases and offers a range of different mental health resources, personalised to the user and their specific needs and struggles.

🛠 Tools Used: Flowmapp, Illustrator, Trello, Miro, Figma, Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, Invision, Zoom and Slack.

🔁 Development Lifecycle: Design Thinking Methodology

👥 Team Members: 3

View The MindLink Case Study in detail

Secondary Research and Proto-Persona

Our secondary research was primarily based on a literary scholar who created a survey regarding mental health mobile applications and their effectiveness.

To develop our proto persona, we utilized our initial understanding of the target user group, based on assumptions and secondary research. We identified key characteristics, needs, and goals of individuals who may seek mental health support. This early-stage persona helped guide our design thinking process and make an informed research participant plan. As well as this, we were able have this proto persona as a basis for our persona, later with data from user interviews and surveys.

Primary Research

Qualitative Research

With our research plans in place, we began the process, here is an overview of our primary research:

Research Methodology: Semi-structured user interviews with 5 participants, aimed to discover users' experiences, opinions frustrations, motivations, likes and dislikes with accessing mental health resources.

Participants: There were Five participants in total, all 5 were users that struggle with their mental health, whether diagnosed or not, a mixture of female and male, as well as different age range as this is the target audience.

Conclusion: As depicted below, many users mentioned resources and personalisation, as well as a range of options. This reflects the possible features, wants, and needs for users.

Quantatitive Research:

Research Methodology: Survey Questionnaire, with 8 participants in total.

Conclusion: As depicted below, 75% of participants would like to see personalised resources as a feature within MindLink or a mental health. Pain points/concerns of using an app like MindLink is costs and unsure of the effectiveness (62.5%), given the existing research the reason for this is likely to be the current mental health apps on the market that fail to have an effective mental health resources app.

I like, I wish, What if Analysis

Given the functionalities, wants and needs that were mentioned within the existing research (both directly and indirectly), we synthesised these functionalities by outlining them within the 'i like, i wish, what if' template. This template enabled us to pinpoint different features and functionalities within the app and those that may not be possible (the what ifs) but could suggest realistic indirect functional needs of the user.

Feature Prioritisation Matrix

We then took the features and functionalities ideated within the I like, I wish, What If framework, within a prioritisation Matrix to ensure both the complexity and impact are suffice for a user-centred, functional design.

Storyboard

We then ideated ways in which the applications functionalities or functions can integrate within their persona Julia's life. In this Julia's journey with MindLink, she is currently grieving which is by far the most common reason in the UK for mental health struggles, especially given the recent pandemic.

Flowchart

After defining ways in which Julia and other users of MindLink may use the application. We used those definitions to then define the way in which all these functionalities will work to achieve different user goals depending on the feature. We defined functionality of application with a flowchart.

Wireframes

With the functionality established, we started prototyping and designing mock-ups of different ways we Invision MindLink, here are the onboarding wireframe ideations, view more by checking out the full case study.

Usability Testing and Analysis

To discover the users' opinions of the application, we conducted 5 user-testing interviews, we then analysed this information by categorising and simplifying all the data collected within the interviews.

Iterated Feature Matrix

From the usability testing we found that different features needed to change, but the main feature that needed to be changed was the health plans. In the initial design, the user was asked to create a profile and answer questions to create their health plan, however, the user was unable to do this again after profile creation, this was changed so the user can have multiple health plans.

Final High-Fi Prototype

I present, our final High-Fidelity Prototype, containing changes which were discovered throughout the project and its iterations.

View High-Fidleity Prototype

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

To conclude, MindLink was a successful project, with an outcome that met the standards and requirements of all stakeholders. Due to this being a team project with a deadline, we were tight on time, however, utilising our Trello board helped with that significantly. Going forward, I think I would implement several project management frameworks and tools, since this project had some hiccups which tightened the timeframe we were working with.