Jiminy: Your Mental Health Companion
Jiminy is an initiative started by three women of color who all have grown up without an adequate space to discuss mental health, and were determined to create a space so those who may not have access to traditional mental health care, like therapy, could have an outlet for discussing and managing their mental health independently or collaboratively.
Strategy Lead, Prototype Lead
User Research, UX/UI Design, Usability Testing
Project Manager, User Research Lead, Visual Design Lead, Ethics/Accessibility Facilitator
Kristie Cordon
Sharon Park
Ona Boseroy
When COVID-19 took hold of the world, mental health became a topic more important, sensitive, and acknowledged than ever before. 5.4 million American workers lost health insurance in Spring of 2020 as the pandemic raged on, which led to a loss of access to mental health care. Stress, anxiety, and loneliness gripped the nation, and the world.
According to the CDC, Americans are reporting significant increase in anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic. Women, minorities, people with preexisting health conditions, and adults under 34 all reported higher rates of fear and anxiety.
Over 178,000 people reported frequent suicidal ideation when COVID-19 first started rapidly spreading in March 2020, according to Mental Health America. September 2020, 37% of people reported having thoughts of suicide more than half or nearly every day.
We couldn’t just keep watching our friends, family, and community hurting without doing anything about it. So we wondered, what can we do to alleviate mental health struggles when so many people lost their health care (since for so many, health care is tied to their job and many people across the country were laid off)?
Initial Hypothesis
The problem we suspect is people have a lack of accessibility to mental health resources during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We asked ourselves, how might we provide necessary resources to those in need; particularly young people-of-color or in marginalized groups?
Target Audience
We interviewed 7 individuals, ages 26-30 who have struggled with some aspect of mental health during the pandemic.
Our research goals were:
• Find out what resources are most helpful for our users
• How did COVID-19 affect our users externally & internally?
• What part socioeconomic factors played in affecting mental
health care accessibility?
Creating a research guide, interview guide, and recruitment took longer than expected. We wanted to make sure we weren’t crossing any ethical lines and being as sensitive as possible throughout the entire process. According to this study, “to practice ethically requires awareness, sensitivity, and empathy for the patient as an individual, including his or her cultural values and beliefs.”
After conducting affinity mapping of our users’ answer from the interviews, we found four main major trends in users’ pain points.
Negative Outlook on Traditional Mental Healthcare
Not only has therapy become inaccessible due to COVID-19 affecting loss of healthcare, but our users found therapy to cause more stress than it alleviates due to lack of representation, affordability, and a harrowing search process.
Effects of COVID-19 on Mental Health
People feel overwhelmed by the straining effects of the pandemic. Those who had never had mental health issues before either don’t know how to address it or seek alternative methods as they find therapy “unnecessary.”
Craving Social Interactions
People are finding that reckoning with stress has become harder without their usual social routines. People want to lean on their loved ones but aren’t sure how.
Social Media: a Blessing and a Curse
Being able to connect with others who may also be struggling through humor, memes, etc helps users feel less alone, but can also amplify negativity without moderation.
Based on our findings, we separated our personas to reflect those who wanted more guidance and support, and those who wanted to be more self-reliant.
Name: Norah
Age: 26
Occupation: Brand Manager
“Nobody wanted to hear my stories and my struggles seemed invalid and I felt insignificant.”
Norah believes that therapy is necessary but often inaccessible.
She felt neglected by her therapists, and she desires to speak to someone who looks like her and can empathize with her own background.
Due to COVID-19, she feels disconnected from friends and is nervous about losing healthcare.
Name: Marc
Age: 30
Occupation: Programmer
“My ultimate goal is to rely on myself because I don’t feel therapy is necessary.”
WFH and a lack of social activities has made him stressed and unmotivated. He’s been feeling drained by constant negativity caused by COVID-19.
Growing up, he wasn’t surrounded by conversations on mental health, so he doesn’t know where to start.
Marc wants to learn how to manage his own mental health.
Though we originally wanted to find a way to make mental health care more accessible during the pandemic, user research revealed to us that traditional mental health care such as therapy was deemed unhelpful, unnecessary, and more stressful than relieving.
After noticing a few major trends, including need for connectivity along with independently managing one’s own mental health, research informed us that users actually need a way to integrate individual mental health management with supported social activity.
So we decided to pivot…
Refined Hypothesis
The problem is users like Norah and Marc need a safe and engaging space for mental health conversations without feeling drained or overwhelmed by them.
By creating a platform that integrates a social and independent approach to addressing mental health we will help them process their psychological and emotional wellbeing and feel meaningfully connected with their friends. We will know this to be true when users check into the app multiple times throughout the week within the first three months after initial download.
How might we provide users like Norah and Marc with a safe space to discuss their stories and feel validated?
Competitor Analysis
We wanted to check out what apps were already existing in the mental health space and see how they handled mental health care from an individual and social aspect.
Most had a daily logging feature, which we agreed would a crucial feature of any mental health app, since it would allow the user to track their mental health, and it would mean user retention from a business aspect. The only app that didn’t have daily logging was Therapeer, which was a solely social-based, support-group platform.
The problem with Therapeer was that, without a moderator, the sessions can quickly become toxic and chaotic, with users who are unable to hold space for others endlessly venting and overwhelming the rest of the group with their own problems. This was definitely something we wanted to make sure we stayed away from.
We wanted to check out what apps were already existing in the mental health space and see how they handled mental health care from an individual and social aspect.
Most had a daily logging feature, which we agreed would a crucial feature of any mental health app, since it would allow the user to track their mental health, and it would mean user retention from a business aspect. The only app that didn’t have daily logging was Therapeer, which was a solely social-based, support-group platform.
The problem with Therapeer was that, without a moderator, the sessions can quickly become toxic and chaotic, with users who are unable to hold space for others endlessly venting and overwhelming the rest of the group with their own problems. This was definitely something we wanted to make sure we stayed away from.
Reflections
What stood out to us is a gap in the mental health space - apps were either purely individualized or community based. We can stand out by giving users a platform to explore mental health independently or collaboratively through a self check-in or group activity.
Since users like Norah and Mark both noted the feeling of isolation and wanting the ability to discuss what they are going through with friends and family, without the conversation getting out of hand and entering doom-scrolling territory, we focused on designing what the user would see when engaging in a discussion with a contact with the help of an AI moderator.
Watch the video walkthrough created with Adobe Premiere Rush
This project was admittedly trickier than anticipated. We all felt nervous about the amount of time we were taking to complete this, however to us, it was so much more important to take the time to make sure we didn’t cross any ethical lines, create anything that might do harm to anyone, and create a sensitive approach to the recruitment and research of our users.
Mental health struggles can be difficult enough and we didn’t want to accidentally hurt anyone by having any questions or recruitment styles that would be insensitive. We also each had a stake in this project, considering our team was comprised of all women of color who have dealt with our own mental health struggles, and we wanted to ensure we weren’t carrying any biases or cognitive distortions that would jeopardize our ability to provide a safe, caring space for our users.
Constraints
Technological
Since our app uses an AI moderator, AI chatbots can be susceptible to data security breaches, they can misunderstand user sentiment, face vernacular issues and interrupt the user experience. Since our AI will be handling sensitive information, we will need to be cautious.
Ethical
Because each user will have personalized resources and insights based on their data, we will need users to consent to data collection and sharing. Since finding out that apps like Talkspace data-mine and misuse their users’ sensitive data, we want to ensure we create a safe space to gain and keep the users’ trust.
Monetary
We will need adequate funding for the development of the app, and anticipate challenges in finding ways to drive profit without making our users feel like their vulnerability is being exploited or taken advantage of.
Mental Health is incredibly important, now more than ever. When loneliness can put people at 50% higher risk for disease, depression, and mortality, COVID-19 has increased this risk for everyone. With therapy inaccessible and daunting for so many, we’ve created this initiative to bring in healthy and productive conversations for each person to assess and work with their mental health.
With the option of self-exploration or exploration with loved ones, we are holding space for users, whether they are craving that human interaction, or seeking independence.
The process of figuring out what our MVP was and what to design felt daunting, so we created two feature prioritization maps to decide what would best serve users like Norah and Marc.
We wanted our features to reflect the collaborative and independent nature of mental health care within our app…
Daily Check-In
Users should be able to rate their moods and check-in to integrate mental health care into their daily routine.
Reflective Journaling
A self check-in extended to a more reflective and extensive journaling, with the help of resources to inspire or educate them.
Insights & Resources
Users shouldn’t be alone in their mental health journey. Articles, exercises, and meditations should be able to help guide them.
Guided Discussions
An AI moderator will shape discussions between users with resources, questions, & prompts to guide users.
Personalized Dashboard
Users’ home screen on the app will be personalized with insights and resources based off their data.
Archives & Saved Items
Users will be able to save resources and insights to create a personal toolkit they can refer back to.
Accessible
Our target audience voiced many concerns about the lack of accessibility in mental health care. Since we can’t help make therapy itself more accessible, we can at least ensure accessibility of our app for all users.
Which means we’ll need the following tech capabilities…
Intuitive & Familiar
Since mental health requires a good amount of focus, we’re not in the business of surprising users with new or flashy features. We don’t need to add to the overwhelm they might already be feeling. We want to be their relief.
Transparent
We want the user to feel safe on our app. From clear privacy policies to making sure users know where to find everything, we want to make sure we remain transparent and communicative.
Before we set out to drive the design forward, we needed a blueprint to see where we need to go.
With the goal of helping users learn about and manage their mental health and some initial features in mind, we created a user flow to visualize the process of how users will check in on themselves and with a friend.
Guided & Reliable
Mental health can be draining; we want our users to feel like they can lean on us. From guided discussions to privated archival, we ensure our users feel like they can rely on us to guide them through the mental health care process.
As the visual design lead, I came up with the following design principles to ensure all of our design choices align with our values and user needs as we move forward with the ideation and design processes.
When choosing a color scheme, I focused on color psychology while also considering accessibility (i.e. not using colors that are too bright and contrasted since they can be overwhelming to users who may be on the autism spectrum). We used Pegasus to implement a design system.
I created the logo in Adobe Illustrator and came up with ‘Jiminy’ for our brand name to evoke that familiarity from childhood (Jiminy Cricket but the Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio film version, not the original twisted story) and creates a feeling of comfort for users to know they can depend on us to help them make the right moves towards their mental health.
Fun bonus effect, the antennae above the letter “i”’s also are meant to evoke lightbulbs turning on.
We failed our users in the initial usability testing…
After creating the initial wireframes we brought in 6 participants within our target audience to test our screens. Immediately, the cracks began to show. Our users felt frustration with the lack of clarity in prompts and interpersonal connection.
Most common comments included wanting more guidance from the moderator, more time talking with their friends, and clearer instructions throughout the guided discussion.
Since we’re creating this platform to give users the ability to have a guided and supported approach to their mental health, we made sure that for the next iterations, we gave the user clearer and more guidance throughout the discussion process, as well as more time to talk to their friend without interruption from the AI moderator.
Native App
We chose to design a native app because of our goals for accessibility, platform ownership, notifications, and contacts integration.
Confidentiality
We’re handling sensitive information, and as such, we want to be sensitive towards providing our users with a sense of privacy and trust.
AI Chatbot
Our users’ guided discussions will be led by an AI Chatbot. Chatbots are Natural Language Processing (NLP) based frameworks that interact with human users using spoken, written, and visual languages.
2:1 Conversation
Though chatbots usually operate on 1:1 communication with users (such as for customer service bots), we aspire to have a chatbot that is able to handle two users at a time.
Iterations
Logging Your Mood + Viewing Reactions
We switched to a toggle function for users to input their mood since choosing from a spectrum feels more flexible than choosing one mood. During usability testing, users expressed they wanted to see their friend’s responses too. We implemented this change, which allowed for a more engaging and mindful interaction.
Insightful Resources Paired with Guidance
Users are presented with insightful resources in the form of articles, breathing exercises, meditations, etc. guided through them by a moderator.
As they go through each resource, users can save the entire resource or segments under their personal archive. They can refer to these saved resources to later on after their check in.
Personalized Dashboard
Upon entering the app, user is presented with a personalized dashboard, where the user can find relevant resources suited to their needs and/or start their daily check-in.
During usability testing, some users had difficulty starting a discussion with a friend, although they eventually got to the page. We experimented with different icons during A/B testing. The option highlighted was more successful by 28%.
