According to the WHO, depression can affect anyone, no matter age, gender, social status, background and geographical situation. It provokes moral distress and difficulties to accomplish daily tasks.*
*Source : https://www.who.int/topics/depression
The project
There is a very simple reason why I chose to focus on depression as a case study about wellness : my friends. I realised that some of my closest friends suffer from depressive phases. So I wanted to find a way to help them, beside the friendly, emotional support. I teamed up with another UX/UI Designer, who was as motivated and involved as me in finding a digital solution to help anxious and depressive people.
The competitors analysis
During the secondary research, I realised that the scope was wide. Among the direct competitors, there were apps that promoted wellness : meditation, physical training, sexual wellness. Various websites gather information on wellness. There are different kind of wearables available for health purposes — and they’re not only connected watches : they could take the form of a ring, belt, headphone, or even jacket. As a team, we wanted to widen the range of solution to video games and find several games which focused on depression : Elude, Depression Quest, Actual Sunlight, Flower, and Sym. But above all, the video game world inspired us for this project. In parallel, we conducted a survey in order to collect quantitative data.
GRAPH competitors analysis + data visualisation
The challenge
Depression is a very complicated issue to tackle. It’s related to our deepest fears. Here was my main concern in this project :
How might I, as a Designer, approach such a difficult topic as depression, which is related to factors as different as environment, psychology, or biology ?
Beyond empathy, scientific facts are definitely helpful in finding the problem.
The empathy phase
While conducting Job To Be Done interviews, I made several observations :
- They can clearly define the context where depressive troubles happen
- The symptoms are very different and constantly changing
- Verbalising feelings while being in a depressive state is difficult
- Accomplishing daily tasks is challenging in a depressive state
- They feel like a burden to their relatives and moved away from them
- They don’t feel legitimate to talk about their state to a specialist
- They encounter difficulties in finding different solutions to get better
(empathy map/affinity diagram)
Problem statement:
A day-to day follow-up that helps anxious and depressive people to fulfill their daily goals and improve their wellness through a mobile app
The ideation
(our concept)
From the problem statement, we asked ourselves the question : How might we? Collecting data into an affinity diagram, we defined angles of approach :
- Determine : Help them externalising their problems
- Legitimise : Persuade them they can be helped
- Solve : Show them there is a way out
- Relativise : Encourage them in trying several solutions
From those 4 statements, we ideated through a series of 16 quick sketches — 2 rounds of Crazy 8. Many interesting ideas came out, thus we categorised them and voted for the features that will be included in the MVP. We considered how those features would fit into an app by making a user flow. Through a game, the user could benefit from hindsight as it’s a fictitious world, while at the same time relate to the avatar.
The iteration
To make it credible, it has to stay playful and ludic, not scientific.
Dr A., Psychotherapist
We made the choice to design an app which feels like a mobile video game. During our usability testing, we made sure to have some users who had depressive phases and are also familiar with video games. We highlighted interesting, recurrent feedbacks :
- The goals should remain in the scope of a video game
- Notifications interrupt the users in their game mindset
- The tone of voice should remain friendly and positive
To make sure we conducted a thorough research on the subject, we interviewed a psychotherapist, who’s been practicing for 25 years. Her precious expertise helped us finding the right scope of what we can do as UX Designers. She emphasised on key points, which converged with the users’ insights :
- “ To make it credible, it has to stay playful and ludic, not scientific. ”
- “ Demarcate the app as a help to feel better, not as a substitute to a professional. ”
- “ There isn’t any word I don’t recommend to use, but it has to be supervised by a professional. ”
Through a design critics session among other designers, details in the user interface were pointed out and helped us moving forward to the hi-fi prototype.
The look and feel
While my teammate was the gamer, I happily endorsed the cinephile role. For the moodboard, we found inspiration from nature, animation movies and video games. The ambiances mix daytime with nighttime, and portrays the brand attributes : friendly, soothing, reliable.
From research on typography and art direction in video games, we chose a friendly yet bold font for the logotype, coupled with an easily readable set of fonts. A turquoise colour fits for both the daytime and the nighttime moods, a right mix between the blue-ish and purple-ish tones. It was paired up with a dark blue for the text colour and a dark orange as the accent colour.
Then, we considered the layout, making the grids along with the UI components. We made sure the tone of voice remain friendly and positive by changing the wording in some screens. Since it was used for tests on French-speaking users, all the text are in French for this first version. We also chose the name “Alba’s World” : “alba” means “paradise” in Gallic, and “world” is for emphasising on the fiction. It’s important to remind that, as we are not game designers, we focused on the user experience, hence we used visual references from existing games for this first hi-fi prototype.
What’s next ?
We will look forward to improve the experience by working alongside game designers. While the main purpose is to help users getting better, we need to gather more information from professionals and give feedbacks to the users about their health situation from the data we collect on the app. Through a pluridisciplinary project, we can tailor the app to the user in an advanced way.
Thank you for reading ! 🎮
Credits for the beautiful images in video games : Ori and the Blind Forest, Wildstar, League Of Legends|in animation movies : Kirikou and the Sorceress, The Cat Returns, Big Hero 6 | in apps : Iphone memoji
