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@reichert621
Created June 7, 2018 21:47
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Mental Health Project Overview

Purpose

Goal

  • To track daily habits and productivity against mental health (i.e. anxiety, happiness, depression, stress, etc.)
  • Using this information, to determine which habits/actions have the biggest impact on our mental health

Target audience

  • People who would like to improve their psychological well-being by adopting new habits to find out which ones actually have a quantifiable positive impact on their lives
  • People who would like to improve their productivity and also track the impact of what they consider "productive" on their mental health
  • People looking to get more self-disciplined and improve self-awareness

Method

  • After signing up, users should set up a list of good habits they would like to track or try to incorporate into their daily routine. This may include actions like reading, exercising, meditating, etc. Tasks may be weighted or scored by "intensity" (e.g. "lifting weights at the gym" may be weighted more heavily than "going for a walk").
  • On a daily basis, users should mark which tasks they accomplished.
  • On a daily (or weekly) basis, users should take a short assessment to measure the areas of their mental health they'd like to focus on. The current default assessment is meant to measure depression, but there should be options to measure stress or anxiety, or just overall happiness (if users prefer to focus on the positive, or if they feel that anxiety/depression are not problems for themselves).
  • Over time, users should be able to gain insights through the analytics page into which habits tend to have the biggest impact on their mental health. For example, on days where they went to the gym, depression levels tended to be lower. Or on days that they meditated, anxiety was reduced. And so on.

The current app

The screenshots below reflect the current state of the project. (Apologies for the reduced speed of the gifs 🐢)

Logging in

login

After logging in, the user is taken to the dashboard, which contains their list of habits to mark off, a quick mood assessment, and a link to a more in-depth mental health assessment.

Right now the landing page is a bit "noisy," and can be pretty overwhelming/confusing to new users.

Tracking productivity

productivity

"Productivity" is tracked by "weighting" tasks by intensity (right now in the form of "productivity points"), and then checking these off throughout the day.

The point of this feature is to both encourage the user to be aware of what they're doing on a daily basis (i.e. how much time they're spending the way they'd like) as well as to remind the user which habits they'd like to incorporate into their daily routine. For example, if they have some downtime and are not sure what to do with themselves, they can look over their list for some ideas.

(Test the UI here!)

Tracking mental health

checkin

Currently this assessment is borrowed from a cognitive behavioral therapist's questionnaire for measuring depression. It would be nice to find other assessments that can be tailored to each user's needs. For example, if depression isn't something they struggle with but anxiety is, an anxiety assessment would be more appropriate.

It's also a bit difficult to figure out the best UI/UX for taking a 20 question assessment like this.

Alternate list view: screen shot 2018-05-22 at 11 28 49 am

(Test the UI here!)

Analytics

analytics

The analytics view displays a lot of interesting insights, including:

  • The user's favorite habits
  • The user's average mood/productivity on each day of the week
  • The habits that have the highest/lowest impact on mood
  • The user's common mood issues (such as lack of motivation, loss of interest in work, etc)

The hardest part about this view is deciding what to show, what is the most interesting, what is the most useful, etc.

Design challenges

There are three main components I'd like to improve:

  • The dashboard (where the user can mark off tasks and navigate to other features)
  • The assessments (which measure mood or mental health)
  • The analytics dashboard (for insights)

Dashboard

This is the main view of the app. It should make it easy for the user to check off tasks throughout the day, and encourage them to "check-in" by taking a mental health assessment as often as they'd like (either daily or weekly).

How do we make it as easy as possible to check off tasks without cluttering the UI too much with a giant "todo" list?

Assessments

The assessments are meant to measure mental/emotional/psychological health. The problem here is that to get the most insight, it's more valuable to take a 20-item questionnaire than it is to simply select a smiley face of a frowny face to track the user's mood.

Also, the animated questionnaire that leads the user through each item may feel a bit slow when there are so many questions.

How do we make it as pleasant and painless as possible to take a mental health assessment? Assessments usually entail a set of questions that require an answer from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree."

Analytics

The analytics page should provide as much useful information to the user as soon as possible. But it also needs to avoid overloading the user with too much information.

How do we display this data as simply and as nicely as possible?

Miscellaneous

  • The currently look has a lot of text everywhere... it might be nice to figure out a way to make everything feel a bit less "text-heavy."
  • The "point" system is a bit confusing... it might be better to figure out another way to quantify productivity (maybe with color, or some other type of indicator?)
@QuentWashington
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Hello. I advise you to take your mental health very seriously, because this is not a joke. For example, the service https://us.calmerry.com/try-lgbt-counseling/ provides online psychologist services where you can get qualified help.

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