MediZen
Designing an app for bettering the mental health of medical workers
“Many Americans suffer alone and in silence from a variety of mental health conditions that are undiagnosed, misunderstood and / or stigmatized. While for most of the population mental health awareness is becoming normalized, many of our health professionals hide their conditions due to a fear of losing the trust of their patients, colleagues and employers. In a field where practitioners are regularly faced with life or death situations and tough conversations, mental acuity is at a premium, while mental health conditions run rampant.”
As a group of three, a planning lead, research lead, and myself the interactions lead we were given the task to create a platform to help remedy this problem many doctors are facing, not only here in the United States, but globally as well.
In order to understand the problem space a bit more in depth, we began with an analysis of “mdundertheradar.com”, a platform for female medical professionals seeking mental health resources & tools.
Our research goal was to discover what sort of problems existed for medical professionals when it came to accessing mental health, and determine what type of product we could create to help mitigate those pain points. We would do this by doing external research on the topic, conducting a feature analysis on existing apps and websites, interviewing medical professionals, creating affinity and empathy maps, and creating user stories.
There was a lot of information about the legal repercussions of physicians and fear of license renewal issues.
Vice interviewed the author of the study, where she said “Many physicians are reluctant to seek care because they’re concerned that doing so could negatively affect their medical license”
We then did some competitive analysis on some top platforms for mental health including but were not limited to:
Calm
Talkspace
Headspace
Moodfit
MoodMission
Sanvello
Then we sent out a screener survey to as many people as possible through social media and other online platforms with the intention of gathering some medical professionals that would be willing to volunteer for some interviews on the subject of mental health needs in the medical field.
We interviewed 14 medical professionals to get their take on the subject, and to see if how they felt aligned with the information we gathered from previous studies on the matter, as well as to see what other barriers might exist.
The most common barriers for participants taking care of their mental health needs were time and fear of judgement.
We created an affinity map of notable quotes from our interviews. One major theme in our interviews was that none of the medical professionals felt that they had the spare time at work, especially to dedicate to their mental health.
We decided to go with a mobile app as our platform of choice due to the fact that through our research we gleaned that the largest barriers for medical professionals accessing mental health resources was because of time constraints.
User stories were written based around who would be using our app, and what our participants need. They want 24-hour access to mental health resources, to remain anonymous, to journal; they want a reference guide for exercise, and to feel a sense of community so they didn’t feel so alone in their struggles at work.
When starting to design our app we came up with the following style guide to help our team stay on the same page when it came to the look and feel of our app.
Colors and imagery we chosen that evoke calm & relaxing moods to help our users with anxiety and stress.
During our groups design studio we sketched out a few lo-fi wireframes and then decided which frames & features we wanted to proceed with.
The image above shows the transitions from sketch to low fidelity and again to mid/high fidelity.
The three user personas above were created to represent different types of potential users that we would be designing for.
We began prototyping and then came up with the name MediZen for our app. It provides a safe place for doctors to access mental health resources and tools while remaining anonymous.
When starting the app for the first time you will be guided through a quick onboarding process that includes a few short messages that will tell you what MediZen is offering while maintaining a hospitable tone.
From the main landing page you will be given the option to log in to keep track of your mood, save journal entries as well as the ability to create a favorites list. The bottom navigation bar links to the journal, wellness, home, workout, and reachout screens. There are also secondary navigation items in the banner, such as the Hamburger menu and the Profile button.
The journal allows a user to create a text entry with a respective emotional state and the option to add an image or voice entry.
The wellness section is where you will find a collection of quick (5–10 minute) videos and sounds that help with stress, anxiety, mental fatigue, breathing and sleep. Like the wellness page, the workout section offers quick guided workout exercises to improve your overall mood.
Lastly, in the reach out section we provide the ability to be connected to a local mental health crisis hotline. We plan on implementing community groups and forums that will allow users to chat anonymously with others in a safe environment.
After building a clickable prototype we set out to conduct some user testing to validate or invalidate our design choices. Here are our main findings as well as solutions to the issues we gathered from our user tests.
Luckily we did not encounter any severe issues with our prototype. Now we will continue to iterate on our designs and implement the solutions to the issues we discovered during our user tests.
The mental health needs of our medical professionals is far too important to just let it continue to deteriorate in the way that is does for so many medical doctors that so many of us rely on for our own health. We hope that with the help of our app we can mitigate some of these issues with the overall stigma against the mental health needs of our doctors.