DBSA-SF

Inspiration

Mental health is a 24/7 problem and professional care isn’t always accessible. Currently, those who don’t have the time or money to access professional care are left to seek their own information, which often leads to long scientific articles they may not understand, inappropriate Web MD self-diagnoses, and then the feeling of “well, what can I do about it now?“. In response, we wanted to add to the DBSA app to create self-management tools to empower those with mental health take care of their mental health on their own.

What it does

We redesigned the DBSA app to include new features that would help users learn more about their mental health and the tools to help them manage them on their own. Challenge Feature: For some users with mental health, what can help them get through their day is just doing something. With the new challenge feature, users are given a daily self-care challenge with activities that range from “go on a walk”, “take a silly selfie”, or “bake a cake”. The purpose of the challenge is to give users something to do - from our research, we learned that one way to help relieve depression and bipolar symptoms is to keep busy. To also give users an incentive to participate, we’ve gamified this experience to give users “self-care” points for every completed challenge. Users can share their challenges in the community feed or save them to their journal. Self-Assessment Feature: Users can self-assess through a daily check-in feature. They would answer 5 questions and users would get recommendations of what they can do after - such as suggested videos, articles, or breathing exercises. I need help Feature: while we wanted to emphasize self-management, we understand that sometimes users need immediate help. Users are first shown a guided breathing exercise to help calm them down, but if more action is needed, they can call for help. Self-care is also knowing when to ask for help so we don’t want users to feel like they can’t ask for help.

How we built it

We built our prototype using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

We acknowledge that a big challenge was that we took on too much for this project. We were already at a disadvantage being in a team of 4 and we were really ambitious to take on the entire app instead of building one feature in such a limited amount of time. We were also unable to do a proper designer to developer hand off and couldn’t give our solo-developer on the team enough time to build. In addition, a majority of the team members are in different parts of the world - New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Pakistan - so collaborating in different time zones also made it very difficult and at some point may have affected our own personal self-care.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

Despite all of the disadvantages we had, we designed an entire app in the time we had.

What we learned

We were so focused on the bigger picture, we literally designed the entire app. We should have started small and focused on designing and building one thing while considering how that could contribute to the bigger picture.