Pause: The digital way to approach mental health

7 min readJun 16, 2022

Pause is an app mainly designed for people in their initial stages of depression. This app helps people to understand changes in their mood patterns and help them to feel better

The Client

The Daily Health Conference is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting health and wellness through impactful public talks, participatory workshops, and professional training worldwide. They wanted us to present a new mobile app designed to support wellness. The only requirement is that it tracks the user’s progress and pushes them to commit to a healthier lifestyle

For this project, we are going to focus on mental health

but, what is mental health?

What is good mental health?

Good mental health means being generally able to think, feel and react in the ways that you need and want to live your life.

The main problem with people with bad mental health is going through a period of poor mental health you might find the ways you’re frequently thinking, feeling, or reacting become difficult, or even impossible, to cope with

They range from common problems, such as depression and anxiety, to rarer problems such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

To even narrow down the topic we decided to focus on depression

We started our secondary research on depression, did you know ….

Recent studies in France showed that the number of people suffering from depression has increased from 15.5% on October 21, 2020, to 22.6% on November 25, 2020.
The main age group affected by it is 15–24 years old
Women(15.8%) are affected by depression more than men(11%)
5% to 15% of the French population at risk of having a depressive episode during life

Available from : https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290014/prevalence-of-anxiety-in-france-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/

Depression is a feeling of low mood that lasts for a long time and affects your everyday life. It can make you feel hopeless, despairing, guilty, worthless, unmotivated, and exhausted. It can affect your self-esteem, sleep, appetite, sex drive, and physical health.

In its mildest form, depression doesn’t stop you from leading a normal life, but it makes everything harder to do and seem less worthwhile. At its most severe, depression can make you feel suicidal, and be life-threatening.

Feature Analysis

To better understand our client and know where can we market ourselves, I did a feature analysis that allowed me to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the top six competitors. All of which had shown that there was a gap in the market for an app that combines all these tools, so that the users know where to go without feeling discouraged or lost.

Problems being solved: Most of these apps allow users to access their features at any time, search for therapists and treatments while remaining anonymous, and offer a number of ways to stay engaged, like daily reminders, feelings trackers, and abundant learning material

Problems being ignored: Apps can not replace psychiatrist treatment, it can be used as help when you are going to pycastrist

The rise of new problems: Potential pitfalls with goal tracking depression apps,

one of several apps that asks users to rate their anxiety level before and after they complete an exercise, users may feel a cognitive bias pushing them to say that I feel better.

User Research

The secret of any research to obtain real answers, is to interview the right audience. That being said, finding the right audience is probably the most difficult part of research, specially when we are working with a topic such as depression.

Survey :

Unfortunately, there is still a big stigma in certain cultures about depression; therefore, most people are not open to talking about it. However, some people responded to our survey and insights are as below:

100% of people who responded to the survey said, they felt better after doing some physical or creative activity
70% felt lonely
50% felt need to talk with someone

After the survey we talked two subject matter experts to understand the topic more in deep and confirm our assumptions

Insights Aurélie Psychologist for in Ephad:

There are several levels of depression-like :

Very mild depression — dysthymia (less than 3 weeks)
Characteristic depressive episode (more than 3 weeks)
Melancholy depression -> delusional

The symptoms of depression are different according to age.

Women are affected more than men

Also in all the phases of depression, it recommended to talk with Psychologist

Qualitative Data

We conducted told 6 interviews , our main focus was find out how people feel during the initial phases of depression and what helps them to improve

Pain points of users which come out from user interviews :

They felt lonely, and frequently had self-doubts
Difficult to find out their state of mind
Cant share their feelings with friends and family
Changes in sleeping and eating patterns

The main focus of discussion with our second subject matter expert was on how people behave when they are depressed as it will help us to confirm our findings during the under interview

How you notice people are depressed:

-> They don’t get dressed properly

-> They are really tired

-> Traumatisms'

-> Domestic violence

-> suicidal thoughts (urgent)

Symptoms:

Problem in their sleep

Irritability

Low self esteem

How do they know, they are depressed:

Most of the time people around them (80%) tell them or ask them certain types of questions which rings the bells

Affinity Map

Here we identified the main pains and gains for our users.

Pain points

Feeling loneliness and self doubt
Not want to participate in any activity
Not able to share their feelings with close friends and family

Goals

To see their friends and family and engage with them
To do their activities regularly again
To feel good about themselves

User Persona

To take us out of this research and let us focus in solving for the user, we created a representation of our target audience.

User Journey

Problem Statement

People in the early stages of depression caused by social pressure need to understand their mood fluctuations to go back to normal life.

Ideation

We have diverged and now we need to converge to make a decision. There are many useful tools/apps in the market, but our users don’t seem to find help when they need it. Perhaps, the idea of bringing all these tools together into one app will make a bigger impact in our users — High Impact — Low Effort.

For ideation, we started with worst idea and did crazy 8 to narrow it down

For ideation in this project, we apply the MOSCOW method for feature prioritization

For our must have features we decided to narrow it down to below features :

Mood tracker: to identify fluctuations in their mood
Set goals and track progress
and beck test

User Flow

Having defined the MVP for our app, we moved forward to the structure information architecture and created a User Flow. The User Flow helps us map and define how our users can accomplish a task. It is created before wireframing so that we can plan the screens that need to be generated.

This user flow shows the steps a return user would have every-time they interact with the app.

Low fi

I tested my screens and I was pleased to see most people could successfully navigate through the “happy path”.

Then, we moved on to improvement — From Lo-Fi to Mid-Fi prototype. The following screens needed to be redesigned to match our user expectations.

Mood board

For the main CTA we decided to go with green as it comes from nature and helps to sooth the emotions

For our most used color , I choose Yellow as it gives everyone the impression that it is full of brightness so as to hide the darkness beneath the bright shade of yellow.

Depression is frowned upon in society. People who have it fear that they are stigmatized so they will hide their depression by ‘putting on an act’. Making everyone around them think they are perfectly fine and happy. Depressed people may overplay their ‘happiness ‘. That’s why I choose yellow. Its excessively bright that is easily noticed.

Shade of yellow used in the app is chosen from the golden hours in the morning

Brand attributes

Clam

Peaceful

Natural

Illustrative

Font

As for app and website, font type is very important

In our case, as per our research the context of using our app is very essential. Our target audience is mainly users in the their initial phases of depression so we decided to go with humanistic font Nunito sans , which do not add any fancy elements and make reading easy for the user

Please find our final HIfi below

Next steps :

To implement all the feedback that we got in our design critic
implement notification and beck test feature

Conclusions

Immediate feedback is necessary for every task completed.
Research is very important in each phase of design

Thanks