the space you've been looking for, where you finally feel safe and stay connected
Design brief provided by DesignLab UX Academy -
"taking care of one's health"
Research
Ideation
Branding
Prototyping
Wireframing
User Testing
12 weeks
The Couch is a social and forum website designed for users interested in mental health topics to share questions, concerns, and support in a comfortable environment.
Users can sign up to explore different communities, post related content, and interact via comments.
The platform facilitates 1:1 connections with features like following, private messaging, and video calls.
Mental health is no longer a strange term in our society. However, many young people are still struggling to find resources to manage their mental health problems. I wanted to find out what barriers users face and what they look for to safely find mental health resources and improve their lives.
What barriers do people face when seeking mental health support?
Develop a social and forum website where users who are interested in various mental health topics can come together and comfortably share their questions, concerns, and encouragement.
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Find how people cope with mental health and their struggles when using mental health resources so that we can offer affordable, accessible, and usable tools that they can use consistently.
- Understand how people assess their own mental health and identify what they struggle with.
- Determine what encourages people to look for mental health help.
- Learn what keeps them from looking for mental health help.
- Determine where/how people access mental health resources.
- Understand what motivates people to use the mental health tool consistently.
- Learn what makes them stop receiving help or using the tool.
- Understand how using the tools fits into their daily life.
- Customer Survey
- User Interviews
- Competitive Analysis
To achieve the research objectives, I conducted a competitive analysis of The Couch's key competitors: Wisdo, 7 Cups, Circles, and Sesh. This analysis highlighted their strengths and identified user pain points. The insights gained from this evaluation, combined with additional research findings, were instrumental in informing the development of The Couch.
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In order to have a better understanding of users, I interviewed 6 participants between ages of early 20s to 30s. Participants' occupations varied from a student, a teacher to those who work in marketing and tech industries. Below is the summary of the interviews:
- All expressed mental health is very important
- All expressed they want to improve mental health
- Most expressed they find or have found difficulties in accessing appropriate mental health care at the beginning
Participants want to improve and prioritize their mental health in order to better their physical health, relationships, and to increase their self-awareness
- Affordability
- Stigma on mental health
- Lack of trust
- Lack or resources
- Credible, research-based resources for mental health education and information
- Safe space for a sense of community
- Connecting with people with similar struggles and similar background. Don't want to feel alone
Based on the research, I developed two user personas for The Couch, each reflecting the motivations, pain points, and desires of the target users.
Prioritizing users' needs and look for's, I designed the sitemap below.
As a designer, it is extremely important to empathize with users but also to work well with stakeholders. So I compared the user goals and business goals to see what the distinctions are and the overlap. This practice helps me to determine project goals that will benefit both users and the business.
I began by creating low-fidelity sketches of The Couch on my iPad. Following that, I moved on to prototyping mid-fidelity wireframes for both mobile and desktop versions. Mid-fidelity wireframes are crucial in the design process, as they allow me to identify issues and make revisions more easily than after creating high-fidelity mockups.
Keeping The Couch's vision in mind, I made careful branding decisions to convey its commitment to safety, openness, and togetherness. I selected earthy, muted colors of green and yellow, along with other neutral tones, to evoke calm, natural, and relaxing feelings. The overall layout and design elements are minimalistic.
It's finally time to bring my mid-fidelity wireframes and branding to life! I've added a few more screens, including profiles (self and others), community home, and posting screens. Additionally, I've revised the communities onboarding screen to enhance user experience. Instead of bubbles for topic selection, I've opted for a list layout in alphabetical order to help users find their topics more easily.
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Now that I've built the prototype, it's time to conduct usability testing, a crucial step in the design process to empathize with users. I prioritized a few task flows for users to explore to assess The Couch's usability. The test was conducted virtually with 5 participants, each session lasting about 15 minutes. At the end of the test, users answered questions to provide feedback.
1. Make an account
2. Sign in
3. Join communities
4. Upload a post
1. Successful completion of the tasks.
2. Participants spending appropriate time on each task.
3. Overall accessibility, such as color contrast, font size, icons, buttons, etc.
I organized the feedback using the grids below. First, I sorted it into four categories: what worked, questions, ideas, and changes. Then, I used a severity-frequency grid to prioritize the feedback based on the seriousness and frequency of the issues identified during user testing.
Based on usability feedback, I added a fixed bottom navigation bar for easier access to menu items and simplified the top bar as shown below:
Some users had trouble locating menu items like the profile and communities. Others mentioned the top bar of the home page looked cluttered.
Added a fixed bottom navigation bar for all menu items, clearing up the busy top area.
As a beginner designer on my first project, I loved creating something personally meaningful. I faced challenges early on, especially with avoiding assumptions about user needs. Through research and ideation, I learned to focus on users' desires and goals expressed in interviews and surveys, becoming more user-centered in my approach.
- Prioritize adequate time for thorough research to pinpoint user needs and define the problem clearly.
- Use Figma efficiently to create components and explore various variants, optimizing time and productivity.
- Develop the skill of working efficiently within specified time constraints.
- Embrace flexibility by making necessary changes to initial sketches and wireframes without hesitation.
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