We designed a mental health app in two weeks and won second place in the final presentation of innovation fair. The initial concept that we proposed for the unfold app is to create a safe and secure space for people to open up, heal themselves through unfolding letters from others and send support through writing letters.
Unfold is a mental health app that helps people overcome the lack of communication during and after the pandemic. “Unfold” aims to provide a healing community for expressing feelings safely. You will encounter friends through anonymous letters and embrace every unique person with a sincere heart.
Many people these days are used to keeping the difficulties to themselves but do not choose to open up. Not knowing how to express emotions is affecting individuals' mental health, especially under the impact of COVID-19. Moreover, the mental health stigma turns into negative attitudes and discriminations, which makes people feel ashamed about their mental health condition.
A mental health app to help people safely express their feelings and be aware of their mental health state, create a healing community for people to share and support each other.
We conducted an online survey as well as five interviews to understand the problems that users face when sharing about their mental state and feelings, as well as the services they think can be done to improve the current service.
55% of people reported internal difficulties due to the pandemic.
46.8% of people think that public stigmas stop them expressing their personal feelings.
75% of people think that they feel more secure if they can share feelings anonymously.
18% of people are willing to share their ruffles and difficulties to others.
- People found difficult open up in front of others.
- There are public stigmas of mental health issues that people feel burdening others when they ask for help.
- Most people found its hard to monitor their mental state because emotions varies.
- Most people do not know where to seek help other than booking a clinical appointment with the therapist.
How might we create a safe place for users to comfortably share their ups and downs?
How might we help users to know more about their mental states?
How might we make users feel connected to each other positively?
1. Anonymous Letter Writting System.
2. Rulebook:any inappropriate and perfunctory letter will be filtered.
1. AI chat bot to evaluate user’s mental state on daily bases and provide scientific guidance
2. SOS helpline when the condition is serious
3.Weekly mental state graph report to monitor users condition.
1. Pen pal: to build friendship with similar person
2.Cuddles: to encourage people using the cuddle button and receive weekly reports for positive energies sent out.
The persona characteristic and the main insights are based on the research and survey results.
We also Use the empathy map to help us better understand the ‘users’ needs.
We also conducted competitive analysis to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the applications in the current market to see what can be improved and get valuable insights to our app.
With our initial research steering us, I started putting together some early designs for the app. We minimized our functions to three big aspects in order to make navigation easier. Moreover, I kept the UI clean and simple with matching colour scheme on most relevant information and implemented the best UX practises to provide users the best experience using the app.
Considering that it’s a mental health app, I chose to go for the colours and the typeface which provides calm feeling and smoothing interfaces to the users to form a perception of secure and tranquility.
The logo consists of two heart shaped folding papers, which reflects the connection between two strangers through unfolding envelopes.
“Unfold the envelopes to sooth the ruffles of heart”
The swipe/click through introduction screens are outlining the value of the app. It’s a simple and effective way for users to get to know Unfold. There is also a skip option with the tutorial.
Consist Of:
1. Three random mails pushed by the system, with the increase of the app use, the algorithm will push mails depending on their using habits and help them find more similar pen pals.
2. Inbox for receiving random mails from strangers or replies from pen pals, with customized stamps and messages displayed in the time order. The inbox will be emptied from the start of each week, so it is important to collect any interesting emails as fast as possible in case they are lost.
3. Date and weather widget to remind the users of today’s date and weather. They can also view previous information back from three days, including weather, date as well as mails.
4. Quill pen for writing things about yourself, share with strangers of your day.
The AI bot will evaluate the user’s mental state condition through chatting. The AI bot will also provide professional guidance based on the result. The mental state report is generated every day to help users monitor their mental condition. SOS helpline is implemented in the tea lounge to make sure that user’s emotions are under control.
Easy navigation through the app to access the reports and collections. The daily mental state report result will be collected and represented in the weekly mental state graph. The users can track their emotional condition and have an overview of their mental health. With the use of the app increase, the higher the level, the more stamps and letter papers will unlock for users to choose when they write and sent letters. Moreover, users can check how many cuddles they sent during the week and the total of cuddles sent from the whole community. We hope to deliver positive messages to every user in the community through the 'weekly positive energy report' to let everyone knows that each user is contributing positively to the app.
Designing an app for the innovation fair in only two weeks has been a challenging and rewarding journey. The major challenge was to create an outlet for peoples’ emotions, no matter whether it is positive or negative. They can express their feelings safely and freely without worrying about judgement or discrimination.
Knowing that my other teammate had suffered through mental health issues before and recovered, made me realize that mental health issues are non-negligible, we should care more about our loved families and friends because sometimes a word can save a person from despair.
All in all, the proposed design of our mental health app won second place in the innovation fair. As the only designer in the team, I successfully delivered all of the function prototypes in two weeks and got great feedback from the judges even though I had a lot to do for the next level.
In the future, we will keep perfecting the functions and conduct usability test to make sure that the app is user centered and actually solve the problems.
