Case Study
Supporting mental health management
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Mood triggers was designed for people with anxiety and depression to help them track the factors that trigger their symptoms and provide treatment options that may help manage these factors. When I joined the Mood Triggers team, the relevance of the product had already been validated and and user feedback had been collected to identify the main pain points. My primary focus of design was the Statistics page and dashboard
Mood Triggers 1.0
The navigational centre of the app was the dashboard; from there users could see information about their activity, anxiety, sleep etc. Users could see correlations between different factors and their anxiety and depression and information for this was collected through daily surveys. While there was large adoption of the app by users, they expressed having difficulty understanding how to navigate the app, as well as in making sense of the complex data they were presented
While there was large adoption of the app by users, they expressed having difficulty understanding how to navigate the app, as well as in making sense of the complex data they were presented. We identified a couple of points of user friction from user feedback and through usability analysis.
Unintuitive data visualisations on the statistics page
Lack of clear hierarchy and consistency on dashboard
Unclear buttons & inconsistencies in button design
In redesigning the statistics page, our key concern was how to present complex correlational data in an easy-to-understand and clean way
We spent a lot of time on ideation, trying to find different unusual visualisations because we assumed that more interesting visualisations would hold users' attention more. However, it turned out that being unable to immediately understand data on a page created a layer of friction that users were unwilling to overcome
In redesigning the statistics page, we considered grouping and splitting different types of data, and how interactive components might improve users' experiences
Line charts cleanly visualise trends over time
To allow users to track their progress over time, we use a line graph, and included functionality that allows users to toggle between different time periods
Bar charts make it easy to identify major triggers
We transformed the unintuitive horizontal bar charts on the older version to vertical bars and used colour to indicate the nature of the correlation. We made the bars interactive to link users relevant treatments for each factor.
Interactivity allows users to engage tangibly with data
Being able to interact with data points allows users to learn more about their data and gives users control over what information to display
In redesigning the dashboard, we focused on what the most important information is to users and how we can direct them to it
We created different designs with different information hierarchies, and decided that the most important pages were the dashboard, statistics page, settings and video treatments, which were a new addition. The most important information people needed access to immediately were their anxiety and depression levels and we also experimented with different ways of communicating this information
In redesigning the dashboard we reconsidered hierarchy of information and experimented with different visualisations of data
A fixed navigation bar is clearer than hamburger
We switched from the hamburger menu to a bottom navigation bar which highlighted the main pages and improved navigation for users.
Using size and colour to establish clear hierarchy
Moving from the grid of the older version, we established a hierarchy of the most important information to users, and rearranged the dashboard to reflect this. We visualised anxiety and depression levels with emojis and progress bars to communicate emotional relevance to users.
Suggestions connect users to most relevant treatments
We wanted users to be able to immediately access important treatments and included a selection of treatments relevant based on users' data on the dashboard
Reflection
While working on this project was deeply fulfilling, I think that this work could be greatly improved by taking a more participatory approach to the design. As mental health issues are deeply personal, our assumptions about what information is important to users and when they would want to access some kinds of information may not align with users' actual behavior. As we were constrained by time and access to participants, this was not possible, bit in an ideal world, I would address this shortcoming by including users, through focus groups in designing specific features, and carrying out a card sort exercise to inform the organization of pages.