Mental health is a huge issue these days. The World Health Organization states that in 2019, approximately 301 million people, including 58 million children and adolescents, are affected by anxiety disorders.
Digital products to help relieve this situation abound — there are currently about 20,000 mental health apps on the market today. The market, as exemplified by products such as Headspace and Calm, is incredibly receptive towards the idea: in the US alone, it is currently valued at USD 4.2 billion in 2022 and expected to be at USD 17.5 billion in 2030.
Starting out with some introspection
Mental health is a huge issue these days. The World Health Organization states that in 2019, approximately 301 million people, including 58 million children and adolescents, are affected by anxiety disorders.
Digital products to help relieve this situation abound — there are currently about 20,000 mental health apps on the market today. The market, as exemplified by products such as Headspace and Calm, is incredibly receptive towards the idea: in the US alone, it is currently valued at USD 4.2 billion in 2022 and expected to be at USD 17.5 billion in 2030.
We came out with a prompt, one that is often repeated from our clients:
[…] is a mental health platform where users could find instructions on meditation, mental health therapies, and resources such as counseling contacts and blog.
Equipped with this prompt, we began researching about the situation.
Initial findings
The initial findings show that the data is bleak, but something can be done to help. We sought statistics, read journal articles, delved into some YouTube documentaries and books and series (we loved a nice authentic dose of Atypical), and tried to know as much as we can about it.
If you want to, you can read the deeper dive.
So what did we find out?
We came out with a prompt, one that is often repeated from our clients:
4.4% of all people suffer from depression…
Approximately 4.4% of all people, or 300 million individuals, suffer from depression. And that’s just depression alone. There are many other mental illnesses, stretching across from temporary illnesses like seasonal depression, to neurodevelopmental ones like ADHD.
These disorders can affect people’s daily functioning. Mental health includes emotional, psychological, and social well-being; it relates with how someone handles stress, relates to others, and make choices. No wonder people want to get healthy.
We came out with a prompt, one that is often repeated from our clients:
…and the things the digital products are doing — like meditation — they do help
We examined five digital products. The usual suspects:
- Headspace
- Insight Timer
- Wysa
- Medito
- Calm
Not all of them are our direct competitors — if you see the prompt, we are also seeking to incorporate ways to help users contact licensed therapists — but they’re all related.
They all promote meditation, focus for work, sleep help, and physical exercises, such as yoga and light stretch. Do they work? Yeah! At least from Headspace’s own telling: just a 15-minute session reduces 22% of mind-wandering. And a paper from the University of East London stated that:
…showed statistically significant increases in positive affect with medium effect size and reduced depressive symptoms with a small effect size…
So they do work. To an extent. The WHO also recommends “innovative ways”, such as “digital self-care”, to be made as available and accessible as possible. That’s another encouragement.
But not all mental health products are created equal.
These digital products all have different offerings, different content, and various ways of presenting said content to the users. Also, they have different features as well. You can also take a look at our report.
Wysa, for example, is primarily designed to serve content through a chatbot. You get to talk with the chatbot who will ask on how you’re feeling and prescribe something to soothe the pain, or just note it when you’re feeling great. You can buy a subscription for regular contact with a therapist, too.
It is well-known in product design that there are some features that are not as good for the users as others. In these apps, we identified such features as stories and streaks as undesirable.
The Stories feature, like Instagram Stories, is present in at least one of the apps we analyzed. Given the plethora of mental health apps in the App and Play Stores, we don’t know how many other of these apps have the same feature. But it’s not a beneficial feature, because it’s addictive — the entire platform have been dubbed anxiety- and FOMO-inducing, as well.
Streaks is another feature that is potentially antithetical to the spirit of these benevolent apps. It is a feature that measures the number of consecutive days a user has done a certain activity. In this case, it’s used to measure the number of consecutive days a user has meditated. Given the nature of meditation that asks the user to let go of notions and preconceptions, how can this be in the spirit of meditation?
It is a controversial feature. Some people think it’s total BS and needs to be removed entirely. Yet others love it because it lets them set a target number for discipline. Headspace takes the middle approach of allowing the feature to be turned off manually by the user.
And sometimes it’s hard to even get into the app.
Never mind getting into meditation or mindfulness — sometimes it’s even hard getting into the app itself. What we mean by this is the onboarding process. Some of them can be atrocious.
Calm, for example, has 12+ screens just to get to the main functions of the app, if you’re a new user. It’s even worse that some of the screens are only quotations from people who had their meditation sessions and felt good about it. Also, they asked for why you came into the app — we tried clicking “help for sleep” — but never provided relevant information afterwards. And finally, just right when you get annoyed with the entire experience, you get asked to subscribe.
All of those questions, reading, plus account-making, plus subscriptions… enough to make our brains melt, so we can’t imagine what they would do to a person who has anxiety issues.
The best onboarding is the easy one. But they’re best because they’re easy, not necessarily because they’re simple. As in the case of Headspace. After subscribing to a free trial, Headspace gives you a breathing exercise first of all, before getting into any other part of the app. It’s a memorable experience, and it’s all skippable too.
Scoping how far we will go
So: it’s a huge, huge problem. We will be the first to admit that no one app will solve the wicked problem behind it: all the cultural, social, biological, and plethora of related things that come up behind mental health issues.
But as we see with the other apps, if we’re not solving it, we can at least help with it. What seems to work:
- helping users find therapeutic and meditation techniques to help them relieve stress and anxiety
- a therapy chatbot seems to be really helpful
- this implies the creation of a cool, expressive mascot
- getting more serious help: contacting licensed psychologists.
We’re going to be focusing on what makes these other apps good, polishing our app with excellent experiences from onboarding to completion. We’re going to be focused on ameliorating some of the problems we discovered from the other apps and making our own path of simplicity and subtlety. Before you go further — here’s a list of what we’ve learned.
Enter Oni, the spring onion therapist
Oni is our spring onion therapist. They’re zesty, friendly, full of water (and life!), and add spice to any dish.
How did we get to Oni?
We started out by finding ideas. Turned out many of the ideas are what have been found through competitive analysis, except, of course, the chatbot. The problem space boils down to delivering listenable and sometimes video content in a manner that does not induce any bad or weird feelings.
So it comes down ultimately to something like Spotify, just with specific content crafted for meditation and mental health. Half of the app would be like that, and the other half would be mediated through a chatbot. That’s where Oni comes in.
Oni is friendly, but not overly friendly; positive, but not toxic; hearty, and can sing and whistle beautiful songs. They’re gender-neutral and exactly the kind of spring onion we’d love to talk to if we’re feeling down.
A few other innovative solutions were also listed: the inclusion of a list of offline therapists near you; a people nearby chat feature to help alleviate loneliness; and notification to family and friends if you’re having grief. For now, we’ve put these ideas into the back burner. Though we have to admit that these set of ideas are very interesting to think about — partly because we come from an extraversion-oriented culture.
Creating the app itself
After Oni was created, the rest was figuring out the actual architecture of information. We identified the things we like the most from the apps we figured at the beginning of this text and isolated three main features:
An important for Today section, in which users can see what exercises are best for them today, preselected by the algorithm based on conversations with Oni
A listing of self-care exercises
A feature to contact therapists, book a session, and then go into a text session with them
A journal to track progress
The information architecture of this app was mediated by a process called object-oriented UX. Using this tool, we managed to orchestrate the complexity of all these different objects together, and created a relatively simple architecture that makes sense. Technically, we created artefacts such as the object guide, CTA relationships map, and the object map.
Swiping left gets you Oni
After Oni was created, the rest was figuring out the actual architecture of information. We identified the things we like the most from the apps we figured at the beginning of this text and isolated three main features:
An important for Today section, in which users can see what exercises are best for them today, preselected by the algorithm based on conversations with Oni
A listing of self-care exercises
A feature to contact therapists, book a session, and then go into a text session with them
A journal to track progress
The information architecture of this app was mediated by a process called object-oriented UX. Using this tool, we managed to orchestrate the complexity of all these different objects together, and created a relatively simple architecture that makes sense. Technically, we created artefacts such as the object guide, CTA relationships map, and the object map.
Swiping left gets you Oni
An idea was then born to move Oni’s chatroom to swipe left, from any part of the conventional user interface; as in Instagram messages. This lets the chatbot be flexible: it can suggest content, and when the user clicks on it, they’ll be redirected to the main UI. They can then always swipe back to the chatbot interface at any time.
Oni can listen to the user’s various stories and then suggest various exercises and things to do. When these in-line suggestions are clicked, the user are then returned to the main UI to do their thing; when they have finished, they can move back to the chatbot interface by swiping to the left.
Oni is present in all of the top-level screens. When they’re not prominent, illustrated at the top of the page with a big button to talk to them, there’s a small button on the top right with which the users’ can go to the room to chat any time. Users can also still swipe left to reach Oni’s chat room.
For Today page
The For Today page is designed to show the users the most relevant exercises for them today. This is separated into three times, per day — one relevant for morning, another for the afternoon and another before going to bed. This is curated by an algorithm that takes the users’ preferences and crafts them into a viable listing.
Exercises page
The exercises page lists all the exercises that the user might want to do. It’s basically a listing of content playlists, curated by us to help users with their mental wellbeing. The exercises page leads to the exercise view, in which the user can read a short description of the exercises contained, how long it lasts, and going to the exercises themselves.
Therapists page
The therapists page is relatively straightforward. It’s a directory of the therapists present in the app, that can be filtered based on self-reported specialization. Users can select whichever one they like, book a session, see their schedules, and and go to the session to talk with the therapist.
Journal
The journal page is relatively simpler than the other pages. It’s divided into time slots with relative labeling (today, yesterday, a week ago, etc.). Oni can recognize what the user talked about and summarize it into small quips that are automatically noted into the journal. This page is very personal; it contains the user’s diary, and therefore, it’s all about the user. There’s a profile button on the top left corner which leads to settings.
Try out the prototype.
Feel free to check the Behance presentation here
Check more of our work here
Connect with us: Hello@orely.co