The worldwide psychological well being app market is predicted to hit $7.18 billion in 2024, up from $6.22 billion in 2023. Sadly, analysis means that customers of psychological well being apps typically encounter usability issues, together with a scarcity of customized help, intervention, or sources, an inconsistent person expertise, and sophisticated or complicated interfaces. Briefly, poor design can render even essentially the most doubtlessly helpful apps ineffective and drive prospects away.
Meaning there’s a vital alternative for newcomers within the psychological well being app house to enhance upon current UI design and make it simpler for customers to learn. For instance, in 2022, a San Francisco-based startup growing a psychological well being app for households introduced me in to create an attractive, intuitive, and family-friendly prototype to current to buyers.
The mission was successful: The corporate acquired $22 million in funding and formally launched in 2022. However the street to getting there included many design challenges. Right here, I focus on the issues my staff confronted within the early design course of—together with a tedious onboarding expertise, a complicated navigation stream, and an uninviting app interface—and the way we overcame them.
Placing Customers Entrance and Heart within the Design Course of
Once I joined the mission, the corporate’s analysis staff had already homed in on the supposed app viewers by conducting person analysis, figuring out widespread person segments, and creating person personas. The three personas have been youngsters dealing with psychological well being challenges resembling anxiousness, despair, ADHD, and behavioral issues; members of the family and first caregivers in search of to help these youngsters; and healthcare professionals offering care to the youngsters and their households.
My design staff started by mapping out person flows and figuring out what options would meet the wants of the person personas. Utilizing Figma, we created low-fidelity wireframes of the app’s screens to piece collectively the place customers would begin their journey, how they might navigate to different pages, and the important thing actions they would wish to take to finish a process. We established that there can be 4 key areas inside the app:
- An summary of the app’s options the place households would discover useful info resembling appointment reminders and urged sources
- A communication portal the place youngsters may join with healthcare specialists through video and chat classes
- A useful resource hub for households and caregivers that included articles, white papers, downloads, and toolkits
- An space for reviews and associated paperwork that households and caregivers may view to trace their youngsters’s progress
Subsequent, we carried out usability testing on our preliminary wireframes with inside stakeholders to analyze our assumptions concerning the person stream. Above all, we wished to find out what number of steps have been required to attain particular objectives, resembling finishing the onboarding course of and reaching a related article within the useful resource hub. This exercise helped us uncover the place to simplify overly complicated workflows and create extra intuitive navigation flows.
Taking the First Step: Onboarding
Remedy app onboarding ought to provide a snug entry level for guests who could already be in distressing conditions once they first encounter the app. Sadly, the character of this app meant we needed to collect pretty in depth info throughout onboarding with a purpose to provide related therapy plans—and our preliminary onboarding stream comprised a number of lengthy varieties and a protracted listing of questions that households would wish to reply earlier than reaching the app’s core options.
Since shortening the onboarding stream wasn’t attainable, we aimed to make it extra interactive and manageable as a substitute.
First, we broke the onboarding course of down step-by-step to present customers a transparent sense of the place they have been and what was subsequent. We added determinate progress indicators to assist customers visualize the variety of steps till completion. A “Again” call-to-action button allowed customers to navigate again to a earlier step to rectify inaccurate info, and a “Subsequent” button enabled them to maneuver ahead by means of corrected steps. We additionally added an autosave function so customers wouldn’t lose their progress in case of surprising disruptions, resembling unintentional app closure.
One other overarching enchancment was the addition of clear visible prompts to the onboarding stream. Research present that digesting info can really feel overwhelming when it’s tough to visualise. Robust visible orientation (icons, arrows, progress indicators, tooltips, and animations, and many others.) helps sign required actions, subsequent steps, or key info customers should take note of.
We additionally improved the presentation of the multiple-choice questions by creating a transparent visible hierarchy that distinguished every query from its attainable solutions by means of variations in font weight, measurement, and colour. Every attainable response was positioned on a separate line in a clearly seen, clickable field. Moreover, the chosen reply was highlighted with a darker colour to bolster person enter, reduce errors, and clearly present that these have been single-select questions.
Making Assets Simple to Discover With Intuitive Navigation
The app provided a formidable quantity of useful info within the person useful resource hub, however we discovered that the preliminary design of that a part of the app had no clear hierarchy or logical categorization, making it seem disorderly and overwhelming. A father or mother in search of content material on separation anxiousness must scroll by means of all the useful resource hub to search out related content material, moderately than merely navigating to an acceptable class.
We began by making a welcome display with three primary areas: studying classes (Worries and Nervousness; Sleep and Bedtime; Anger and Aggression, and many others.); customized suggestions based mostly on customers’ earlier studying habits inside the app; and saved sources. Inside the studying classes space, we applied a horizontal scrolling function—typically utilized in content material segmentation—that might enable customers to rapidly scan totally different matters with out extreme vertical scrolling. Customers may additionally choose a studying class to browse its articles.
We then designed the article playing cards. A preview of every article was displayed on a big card, to assist customers effectively assess its relevance and engagement potential earlier than committing their time and a focus. The playing cards included the article title, a hero picture, estimated studying time, related age group, and class tags for comparable matters. (We additionally made the tags clickable so customers may simply bounce to different articles of curiosity.)
As well as, we labored to enhance the studying expertise for every article and incorporate options to assist busy mother and father and caregivers get essentially the most out of the useful resource hub. We added a vertical progress bar to assist customers keep oriented inside the textual content. And we included a textual content highlighter that preserved excerpts, matters, and insights to revisit later. We additionally added a “Save for later” button so customers may return to articles.
Creating an Inviting Surroundings
Our remaining problem was how you can promote a welcoming and supportive expertise for customers by means of visible design. The corporate already had a mode information in place that outlined colour palettes, typography, and iconography. We now wanted to harmonize these design parts in a approach that felt inviting and constructive for customers navigating doubtlessly delicate or triggering matters.
The model’s main colour palette was impressed by the cool greens, pale blues, and muted pinks and purples of the coastal Pacific Northwest—colours which might be typically thought of to have a soothing impact. We labored principally with these hues, however launched pops of some hotter colours to usher in extra vitality and hope, resembling orange and yellow for useful resource class tags.
To create a clear, balanced, and arranged format, we added ample whitespace between UI parts resembling photos, kind fields, and buttons. Equally, we elevated the padding across the textual content within the call-to-action buttons to ensure the buttons have been noticeable and huge sufficient to simply faucet on the go. We additionally elevated the line top of the useful resource hub article textual content to make the content material extra digestible.
Lastly, impressed by analysis that suggests nature imagery could assist enhance temper, we included peaceable animal imagery—specifically, a pleasant otter who’s displayed prominently all through the app.
Constructing a profitable psychological well being app requires a compassionate and pragmatic strategy—and there’s a hole within the market for purposes that outperform the competitors by way of wonderful UI. The design course of reaffirmed for me the worth of working with person personas to realize key insights into customers’ distinctive wants and preferences. With out this key knowledge, we wouldn’t have been in a position to create a tailor-made app expertise that addresses real-life issues and resonates with the youngsters and households who use it.