The Project

PsychScope is an app designed to help youth dealing with depression better manage their mental illness. Through missions and friendly reminders, the user is taught new coping strategies, encouraged to track their mood and sleep patterns, and is able to involve their personal circle of supporters through their check-ins with the app. 

PsychScope is the ultimate digital self-care app.

When the PsychScope team approached us, they already had a rough plan for their app, but really wanted to take things to the next level in order to serve their users better. So we sat down with them to help chart out a detailed plan for the app using the MindSea Mobile App Blueprint process. 

The Mobile App Blueprint is an immersive and collaborative process where we better understand our clients’ user base and product vision. This is where we start to map out everything, from wireframes and user flows, to mock ups and designs.

Building An App Catered To Mental Health

 
In mHealth, we often deal with sensitive and private information. It was important that we started this project with the appropriate protocols and security measures in place to create a safe forum for self-expression. Some of the efforts included:

• Establishing profile security - We wanted to ensure the user had ultimate say over who their information was displayed to. The end result is that someone can only join your support team if you invite them to join.  

• Using appropriate language - We wanted to make sure we were sensitive to those dealing with mental health and made sure to avoid any triggering words throughout the app.

• Launching with simplicity - Deciding on which features to launch in the first iteration of an app, is a common conversation during any build. An even greater consideration, due to the topic matter of this particular app, was the possibility of having too many features that would overwhelm a new user. That said, we needed to keep our first launch simple and easy to use.  

My Role

• Along with another MindSea designer - sketches, wireframes, visual designs, and interactive prototypes

• Animation design

• User testing

• Worked directly with the clients and key stakeholders to bring the product vision to life

• Project manager of the development of the app