Open Eyes
Building a student oriented mood tracker and mental health hub.
Role
Lead UX/UI Designer for the student side of the application
The team consisted of one more lead designer for the counselor side, and a UX project manager.
The problem
Access and Communication:
Students need a way to keep in touch with school-based mental health professionals both inside and outside of school environments so that counselors and therapists can have the maximum positive impact.
Target Audiences:
Mental health professionals based within school environments. As well as any school age student (roughly between the ages of 10 and 18) that would benefit from increased access to mental health services, and interaction with school counselors while in the home enviornment.
Constraints:
The client works within a smaller community, and across several different school districts, With that in mind the scope needed to be general enough to accommodate for any kind of student, but also be specific enough to provide targeted and customizable help, and allow them to feel seen and understood as indivudals.
Pre-existing context
The design was strongly influenced by a competitive analysis. Some of the key issues that other products currently on the market faced was approachability, and organization. In the event of a crisis it is important for a user to be able to quickly and efficiently find the information that they are looking for. If an application is overly complex or cluttered this becomes difficult.
Design Process:
Personas:
I created two personas to represent the average user that might benefit from an application like this, and what some of their needs or desires might be. I used this as something to check back to while working on the app, to see how I could improve it to better fit the needs of the two personas, and ensure that I was keeping both user groups in mind while in development.
Information Architecture:
The Outcome
The application design was accepted by the client and moved to the next stage in development.
Overall the application received positive feedback from several current school-based mental health professionals.
Some user feedback did however highlight a few implementations for the future. The first of which I included immediately, being that the mood tracking section should include a "N/A" or decline to state option, when asking about the high and low points from their day in case a student didn't relate to having a specific high or low point.
Another, being a way to share messages or journal entries with doctors or therapists outside of the school if the user is participating in private therapies not related to the school system, which will be considered for future iterations.
Design Breakdown
Here, students can make note of their current mood, stress levels, and add any additional thoughts they have through a journal entry.
The purpose of this section is to create a baseline for the student each time that they log into the app. Through this, a mental health professional can track their day-to-day mood changes, and notice concerning trends sooner.
The main hub of the app is the dashboard. Containing all of the different pages, it enables students to navigate wherever they need (calendar, mood tracker, messages, analytics, journal) from one place.
The purpose of the analytics section is to provide an overview of mood changes and trends to both the student, and their assigned mental health professional or counselor. Days will be color coded based on if they were feeling less or more stressed, or unhappy that day.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the app, is the chat and conversation pages. This enables students to speak directly with their counselor whenever they are in need of it. Especially in cases of crisis this is essential.
Information collected during daily mood assessments can be accessed later through the analytics page, and contribute to their overall weekly and monthly mood trends.
The client requested a calendar so that appointments can be scheduled within the app, and will notify users of upcoming meetings.
