This is a project for the 32-hr Facebook Global Final Hackathon (due to the time limit, only the essential features are accomplished). We had a 4-person team from Rice University and Carleton College.

My contribution to this project: I proposed this idea and developed the web version.

Relevant Skills: Brainstorming, Prototype, User Journey, HTML, CSS, JavaScript.

EMPATHIZE

During my 3-month psychiatry externship in China, I noticed that people usually visit the clinic only when they had severe mental health problems. The following are some pain points of the potential visitors who choose to not go:

• stigma of mental illness – “You only go to the clinic when you are crazy or want to die”
• time constraints – It takes so much time to schedule appointments and go to the clinic
• financial concerns – The hours are expensive
• doubts about the usefulness – Is this for me? Is this helpful? Do clinicians really care about me or they just want to make money? “Sometimes it made me feel worse.”

On the other hand, there are heated discussions on well-being (anxiety, stress, meditation, yoga, sleep quality) across different social medias, so we believe people care about their mental health but they need a convenient, inspirational and affordable solution.

Therefore, our target users are people who 1) want to change certain habits or experience stress, anxiety and other negative emotions frequently but 2) are not able to seek outside help.

DEFINE

Based on our discussion of the user needs, we defined our challenge as the following:

How might we encourage people to manage their mental health in a convenient, affordable and inspirational way? 

IDEATE

We used the white board and searched similar products such as CBT Thought Diary to brainstorm and prototype our ideas, and we came up with the following user journey:

 

PROTOTYPE

(screenshots of part of the prototype)

 

Feedbacks from the first prototype testing

We conducted a prototype testing with our teammates, peers at Hackathon and judges. Here’s a summary of their feedbacks:

Sharing: it may be interesting to share your garden or a flower with friends. For example, if someone annoyed you, you may gently point it out by sharing a flower that represents annoyance on Facebook, and when he clicks he can see why his behaviors make you annoyed.

Guidance: people may rant about their feelings. To make the journaling effective, you may need to have some tutorials or guidance on how to follow the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy if the users want to.

Encourage Actions: Instead of giving tips, the mental garden can assign personalized tasks to ask users to improve their well-being. If they indicate that they complete certain tasks, they will get rewards such as special flowers or decorations to their gardens.

Layout: Should put the questions at the top. The emoji faces and background look nice.

 

Some other features we want to add

Smart Journaling using NLP:  If they record free responses or voice messages instead of completing the CBT worksheet, the app should be able to identify the strong emotions through NLP.

Take Advantage of the User Input: based on users’ journal entry and other health data including their sleep analysis, footsteps and heart rate, we can use machine learning to estimate their mental health situation and classify them to different user groups. When necessary, we can direct them to outside resources for professional help and share their data with the clinicians under their permissions.