This was a project for my college UI/UX course based on education in Mental Health. The idea of the Stigma App allows people to anonymously share their mental health experiences with others who are also suffering similar mental health difficulties.
Existing mental health apps, from my research, share information on mental health, but they are explained medically. They lack any first hand accounts of what people personally experience during mental health difficulties. Neither do they share the personal experiences so that friends, family or mental health professionals can learn from it.
Sometimes people suffering mental health difficulties find it hard total openly about their experiences, and find it hard to find others that they can relate to. For this reason, the app gives anonymity to the user. Their mail account also exists within the app, so that they don’t have to use their personal email contact details.
Stigma App Aims to help people relate to each other and end Stigma by fact that friends, family and professionals can access these stories through the app.
Trello was used for brainstorming the types of questions we could ask in surveys, by the whole class before we each began our individual projects. This helped generate useful questions, without the question being too suggestive of the answer.
My app idea generation was done in short bursts of sketches, timing mymself for 2 minutes for the first idea generation, then 6 minutes for the 2nd round, then 8 minutes for the last. This helped me to generate ideas and narrow down the concept. These were then drawn up into a storyboard for my app design in further detail. I also created personas and scenarios after I collected my survey research, of a few target audiences, while imaging how they would interact. User testing started from an early stage, with paper using testing initially, followed by prototypes which I made available to testers.
These are personas that I created, which are used to think about an example of different kinds of users, based on my research and multiple research user surveys in the beginning of my project.
These are scenarios that I created, which think about how these user personas may interact with the app and their experience of it.
