MindFulU
Overview
MindFulU is a mood-tracking app created for students by students with the vision of becoming a tool to make mental health management easy and engaging.
Our team’s mission is to help students become proactive in being mindful of their mental and to destigmatize mental health! This is done by making students more aware and in tune of their emotions through the tracking and journaling features.
Background:
MindFulU is a mood-tracking app created by a team of 7 University of Toronto students. Our team won second place in the University of Toronto – Rotman Commerce “Launch your Big Idea” and received funding. Currently, it is on TestFlight.
I joined the team late after the discovery phase, as a UX/UI designer and designed the entire app.
Synthesized user insights into feasible design decisions within a semester
Gathered and evaluated user requirements, in collaboration with engineers
Illustrated designs using storyboards and wireframe
Understanding the Problem
As the designer, I first tried to understand the problem and the solution that they had.
The question: How might we help students at the University of Toronto who are struggling with mental health issues? Do students even know that they are struggling?
The “Solution”:
A mood-tracking app:
1. Identifying emotional patterns
☹️ Keeping track of how you're feeling can help you determine sources or triggers for negative emotions. Through your tracking, you may notice you often feel anxious or burnt out on certain nights of the week.
🙂 By being aware of these negative emotions, you can take a look at what kind of activities occur those days and adjust your schedule to ease your stress and anxiety or add some mindfulness activities!
2. Help you determine which mental health activities are effective for you.
🏃 Let’s say you want to try out some activities for your mental health management (i.e., a quick workout in the morning, chatting with a close friend, or meditating).
💬 With a tracking tool, you can examine the impact of these activities on your mental health! Did they help you relax, increase your positive outlook, and energize you for the rest of the day?
Wireframing the Solution
I mocked up some basic wireframes to gather feedback from my team: especially the engineers and the users on the overall layout and structure of the app. This involved establishing a standardized visual hierarchy and layout.
Developing the Designs
I created the designs on Figma and worked closely with the engineers so that they can inspect the designs and export it into code.
What might have I done differently?
Because I was brought into the team late and wasn’t there for the research or discovery phase, there were a few concerns I had in mind when learning about how they came up with the solution.
MindFulU was created with a solution already in mind - “a mood-tracking app will help the mental health of students”.
The problem with this:
The research was conducted biasedly
In the user interviews they conducted, the participants were not actually students who were struggling with mental health but students who were interested in helping mental health and were studying the same field (so biased participants)
incorrect participants to gather data points from
leading questions (did the interview with a solution already in mind)
With this in mind, I still created designs but it wasn’t very UX design-driven (data-driven), it was more idea-driven.
This is where SORMI comes in.