Redesigning a mental health app for students

Role

Sole designer, personal project

Timeline

December 2020 (2 weeks)

Tools

Sketch, Adobe XD

Stressbusters is a mental wellness app for University of Michigan students. It offers campus updates, soothing videos, motivating messages, and more.

I came across Stressbusters while searching for mental wellness offerings at my university. After regularly using it, I quickly realized that it was:

  • difficult and confusing to navigate

  • hard to find and curate content

  • and lacked expected communication features

As a result, I sought out to do a redesign of this app as a personal project to refine my product design skills. I undertook this project over the course of two weeks.

Screenshots of the current Stressbusters app

Students need a personalized navigation experience that provides access to relevant wellness resources and tools.

Based off of the pain points I identified earlier, I identified three user needs that are not being met by the current experience:

  • A personalized navigation experience with daily curated posts for users, daily greeting messages, etc.

  • Relevant wellness resources

  • Communication features such as a messaging platform to help students find and help one another who might have mental health concerns

Breaking down the current user interface

A visual breakdown of the app’s home screen and its problems

I conducted an audit of the app to understand its information architecture. I started with the home screen and moved through each tab.

Assessing pain points and conducting a heuristic analysis

A summary of the app's main pain points

I defined three user pain points after conducting the audit, which I grouped under three themes: categorization, personalization, and interactions.

I also conducted a heuristic analysis using Nielsen Norman's 10 Usability Heuristics to identify usability issues.

Recognition rather than recall: Certain tabs make users remember how to find relevant content rather than just including it on the home screen.

Flexibility and efficiency of use: Stressbusters does not provide settings to customize the app, making it difficult to cater to the mental health needs of each user.

Aesthetic and minimalist design: The app uses a lot of small text and long paragraphs, which makes it hard to read. There is no hierarchy of content and offers too much content at once.

Conducting a competitive analysis

Product analyses of the wellness apps Calm and Headspace

I analyzed four wellness app competitors: Calm, Headspace, Sayana, and unmasked. For each app, I broke down the structure of the app, its features, and takeaways. Two analyses can be seen here.

After assessing each of the four competitors, I came to the following conclusions:

  • Stressbusters provides many forms of content that is hard to sift through. Users need a way to customize and personalize what content is presented to them.

  • Provide a clear value proposition when the user first opens the app. Users should know how their specific needs can be met through the app from the moment they open it.

Ideating solutions

Sketched wireframes

I sketched out ideas with a focus on these three areas:

Personalization & relevancy of content through new onboarding screens to personalize content and established hierarchy of content using headers
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Community through a new Community tab with a message board, Direct Messaging feature, and comments
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Additional customization through the Profile, Favorites, Settings pages

After doing this, I moved towards low-fidelity mockups.

Low-fidelity mockups

Illustrated assets

I was inspired by one of the app's competitors that I analyzed earlier, Sayana. I loved the app’s use of illustration, so I decided to draw some assets for the Stressbusters refresh.

I conducted three user tests to gain insights and feedback on the prototype. I found:

  • The search feature isn't a must-have across the screens

  • Some buttons are too small

  • Visual contrast between certain elements could be stronger

  • Some icons aren’t easily identifiable without text

Using these insights, I refined my designs for the final prototype of the newly redesigned Stressbusters app.

Reflections

Design Processes

I learned a lot about the steps to conduct a UX redesign from this project, particularly the importance of heuristic analysis and competitive analysis. Both UX methods brought more insight to pain points of the app and how other competitors have avoided or overcome these challenges. I hope to integrate more UX methods into my work in the future to get a better picture of an app's users and their problems.

Importance of UX research

Conducting an audit, heuristic evaluation, and competitive analysis all greatly aided me in the design process. It helped to understand the underlying problems of the app that could be solved through this redesign.

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