Headspace

As part of a Bootcamp, this case study tackled the problem statement of providing a solution for youths to better take care of their mental health with an app that encouraged better mental health management.

Facilitating youths' help-seeking behaviour for mental health and well-being.

We decided to gather insights from this age group, with the following demographics:

Age: 19 - 29

Profession: Fresh Grads / Young Adults new to the workforce

We asked 11 questions and created an affinity map with the following key categorisations:

Thoughts when one is stressed

Levels of comfort in reaching out to close ones

Measures of feeling mentally well

Go-to methods to relieve stress

Self-attitudes towards mental health

Perception of others' attitudes towards mental health

Concerns in seeking professional help

Key insights gathered:

"my stress is normal"

there were mindless vs mindful ways to relieve stress

"I feel most comfortable sharing when they are non-judgmental, provide support and trustworthy"

"I don't see the need for help - it's normal, I'm not there yet"

"There is still a stigma, I'm not sure I want to know the outcome and it's too much of a hassle"

We created 2 different types of persona based on the insights we gathered. Resilient Rachel represents a group that is resistant to seeking professional help. She has the mentality of having to just "tide through hard times" as it is, with little help-seeking behaviour and care for mental well-being.

Introspective Ivy represents a group that is willing to seek professional help or already seeking. She needs affordable and accessible mental health support. Faced this problem, particularly during the pandemic, when mental healthcare was not deemed as an essential health service.

With our personas, we created a "user" journey map. This map traced the actions made by these personas based on the different motivations (e.g feeling stressed, wanting to relieve stress, wanting to problem solve). From this journey, we were able to identify key opportunities based on possible user behaviours:

balance of mindful vs mindless stress-relieving habits range of ways to manage their mental wellbeing gave us the idea to create a platform to allow and enable users to customise their own go-to habits because they would know what works best for them​

providing better accessibility to professional help24/7 AI chatbot​

cultivating mental healthcare habits starting off with daily check-ins and recommended personalised routine based on the check-ins

"Resilient Rachel and Introspective Ivyneed to incorporate more effective ways of relieving stress and gaining a better understanding of themselves, apart from their typical method of mindless relaxation/distraction, so that they can monitor and improve their mental well-being and seek professional help if necessary."

"How might we create a safe and accessible space for users who are looking to monitor and manage their stress and mental health in order for them to feel better and create habits that encourage help-seeking behaviours."

We conducted a Crazy 8s activity, churning 8 ideas individually, in 1 minute. We then rearranged, grouped and voted for the best suited ideas.

The following is the framework we followed to map the ideas to the insights gathered and key needs to be addressed.

We decided to do one more round of secondary research and we came to find out a key insight of a stark difference in self-perception and actual help-seeing behaviour (i.e people state they would seek help but do not actually). Based on our previous interview insights, we hypothesise that this overestimation of their behaviour to seek help could be due to a lack of awareness of when to reach for help and where to begin in seeking for help.

As such, our goal was to create a platform to build habits to track and monitor their mental well-being and raise awareness on how to identify when to seek help and provide better accessibility to professional help.

You may browse the prototype here.

Designing is an Iterative Process

We went back to empathise, doing more secondary research (e.g attending webinars held by Design4Impact MOHT)

Realised something new, and redefined our problem statement and opportunity statement

Reframed how we wanted to come up with a solution

Secondary Research is Important

We gathered many valuable insights and statistics, beyond the sample pool of interviewees that we had (pool of 200 participants vs 11 participants)

We would not have been able to gather such information given our pool of resources and time (e.g the difference in self-perception vs actual behaviour)

Being aware about the setting of an interview, participants responses may not reflect actual behaviours

Project Management is Needed

Our mentor highlighted to us the importance of setting out our priorities given the limitations we have (time, resources, expertise)

We were initially very ambitious in pushing out various ideas (e.g 24/7 AI chatbot, assessment, gamification) but realised we could do it in batches/versions and come back to the idea

Feedback was that we should have done an MVP and done usability tests

More Market Research

Given more time, we would have done a thorough market research on the various features of the apps out there

Usability Testing

We're hoping to continue with a usability test moving forward and further refining our design

More designs to be put in, ideas to explore (e.g possible to have a profile share function with a therapist)

Resource Guide added to the App

We need more extensive research to properly collate a full list of resources, that will be tiered by experts to allow people to have a benchmark to compare their mental state against, and to know when is best to seek help

Expanding More on Given Insights

How can we better help people who have a spectrum of considerations that hinder them from seeking help (e.g outcomes of therapy)​

How can we change the climate/mindset to allow users to treat mental health equal to that of physical and take the measures to take care of that health