BALM

App Design

Overview

About the project

This project solves the problems of bad mental health. According to the research and interview, most people are influenced by study/work pressure which makes them have bad mental health. Mental Health App aims to provide a platform to make users reduce their stress and emotion.

Date
February 5, 2022
My Role
Research/ Interaction Design/ Visual Design

Mental health

An estimated 26% of Americans ages 18 and older -- about 1 in 4 adults -- suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.

Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. In particular, depressive illnesses tend to co-occur with substance abuse and anxiety disorders.

Approximately 9.5% of American adults ages 18 and over, will suffer from a depressive illness (major depression, bipolar disorder, or dysthymia) each year.

Product Goals

· Help users to reduce their pressure from work/study

· Create a platform to make users share their experiences and emotion

· Make users know more about their mental health state and find the right way to reduce the bad mental health situations

Business Goals

· Gain more users to solve their mental health problems

· Create chat room, share a story, and relaxing features, to release stress, and some features help have bad mental health users

· Improve the current state of mental health in the world

· Look for opportunites for premium features

Target Audience

About

My target audience is those aged from 24 to 35 who need to solve mental health problems, and most of them bear the pressure from work/study. They need to release their stress and recover mental health state.

Goals

· Understand user pain points, solve mental health problems

· Know more about emotion and how it influenced by mental health state

· Study and work-life relate to mental health

· Find the function of sharing experience

User Research

Learnings & Findings

Empathy Map

Think & Feel

· Like to release her stress after study or work

· Care more about how to solve mental health problems

· Consider share her experience to someone from internet

· Feels stressful, pressure and emotional on her life

· Play piano , play music, draw, hangout with friends, talk something and share stress.

· Mental healthy people should be relaxed at all times

· Not overthink and anxious

Hear

· Hard to share experience to friends or family

· Easy to be influenced by environment

· Family members sometimes give her negative feedbacks

· Gain more information from internet like some social media app

· Look at lots of things, read a book, or try to understand me.

· Read related books. Look for other people who have  some experience in social media, and learn how to deal  with the same situations.

See

· Use the app to do meditation· Find some peaceful environments to live in

· Work in a fast-speed environment full of work that need to do

· Using social media apps to see others lives and release stress from work

· Good emotions make them enjoy life and feel happy, bad emotions cause bad mental health state and make them depressed and lost confidence in themselves.

Say

· Play the piano, play music, or go outside for relax

· Work at the daytime and walk dog twins a day

· Have course for the whole weeks, and meetup. Try to update resume, and connect someone on linkedin.

· Weak up at 10pm and take a break, and doing cooking, watch videos, and play music.

Worries & Pain

· Care more about privacy

· Find and share experience to someone who  understand their feeling and experience

· Awareness and controlling emotions

· Need some ways to release their pressure

How will they gain from your solution?

· Have a place to share their emotion and experience

· Release anxiety and pressure from work/study life

· Share experiences to strangers to release stress  and find solutions

· Find someone understand their situations

· Have some ways to solve stressful and emotional situations in daily life

· Wants to find a good way for relax· Keep positive thinkings

Problem Statement

I`m Maria, I am trying to make my mental health better. But I can`t because I have lots of pressure from my work and I don`t know how to release them. Only if I had a way to tell me how to release my stress, and how to share my experiences with someone.

Problem Solution

User Testing

Feature

Story

Concept 1: Submitted page

After users completed edit stories and submitted them successfully. This page would pop up and remind users they are submitted successfully.

Feedback

· The submitted page looks like the other preview page. This page also can be a preview page.  

· Add a text to remind users to know they have submitted the story successfully.

· Add buttons to view other stories, also have a cancel button on the top to not view any other stories.

Chat room

Concept 2: Pofile page

Know more about people who talk in the chat room, and also having some experts can help people to deal with their mental health problems. Users can send messages to experts and see their detailed information.

Feedback

· For the profile page, Users would like to know who can help them, and they can send messages to experts.

· Know more information about experts, like what topics they discussed before.

Chat room

Concept 3: Chat box

Users can chat with the others using the chat room box, and give some suggestions and encouragement to them.

Feedback

· Chatbox should be more clear and easy to use

· Add time and date to make it clear

· Can transfer voice to text

Meditation

Concept 4: Customizable meditation page

People can use this page to define their own time and music, and different environments to choose from using the app.

Feedback

· Time is so short to do meditation, and sometimes need to select hours.

· Know how many times to used to do meditation

· “View” is easy to make people feel confused, change to Environment or Background images.