NEURUM APP
PROJECT
Role: Lead Product Designer
Capacity: UI, UX, Research, Visual design & animation
Year: 2023
RESPONSIBILITY
Neurum Health
Overview
Neurum Health stands at the forefront of personal mental health care, offering a platform that revolutionizes the user's mental health journey. By utilizing gold-standard screening tools and pioneering AI sensing technology, the app doesn't just gauge the current mental state—it anticipates trends, equipping users with tailored insights and care to effectively navigate their mental health.
My role
As the Lead Product Designer for Neurum, my responsibilities encompassed a holistic approach to product development, focusing on delivering an exceptional user experience from the ground up. My role was multifaceted, involving a blend of user research, experience design, UI design and design systems, as well as animations.
Challenge
Neurum Health faced a significant challenge with user engagement. While initial lesson completion rates were promising, we observed that users were not maintaining a routine with the app. This trend was particularly concerning because mental health betterment is an ongoing journey reliant on continuous learning.
The stakes were twofold. Not only was sustained user engagement crucial for individual mental health journeys, but the accuracy of Neurum's forecasting and recommendations also depended on user data. The more consistently users engaged with the app, the more data could be collected, enhancing the app's ability to provide personalized and accurate mental health insights.
Project Goals
Increase Lesson Completion Rates: Ensuring users complete the lessons, which are crucial for their mental health education and progression.
Improve Retention: Keeping users consistently engaged with the app over time to support their mental health journey.
Research
In order to devise effective solutions to the challenges faced by Neurum Health, it was essential to gain a profound understanding of our users—both existing and potential. The goal was to uncover the core needs and expectations that would inform our design strategy.
User Surveys: I initiated a comprehensive survey campaign to capture the desires and expectations of our customers. This involved crafting questions that aimed to uncover what users truly value in their investment in mental health care and what they anticipated from Neurum Health.
In-depth User Interviews: To gain rich qualitative insights, I conducted one-on-one interviews with current users. These sessions were aimed at understanding their mental health journeys, the specific challenges they encounter, and how Neurum Health fits into their daily routines. By exploring their interactions with the app, I was able to identify pain points as well as features that resonate well with our user base.
Findings
The comprehensive surveys and in-depth interviews we conducted provided a wealth of data, unveiling that Neurum Health serves two distinct types of users, each with unique needs and goals. The insights we gathered painted a clear picture of these user groups and highlighted the importance of addressing their specific mental health journeys.
Based on these findings, I decided to shape the design solutions around the personas of "The Proactive Self-Helper" and "The Workplace Stress Navigator". By focusing on these key personas, we could ensure that our solutions were tailored to meet the distinct needs of our users, fostering both engagement and effectiveness within the Neurum Health app.
The Proactive Self-Helper: This user is deeply engaged in their mental health, well-versed in the language of self-care, and actively uses tools to maintain their mental wellbeing. They seek depth, progression, and community in their mental health journey.
The Workplace Stress Navigator: This user is often new to the concept of mental health care and feels overwhelmed by stress, especially from their professional life. They require a straightforward approach that offers immediate relief and clear navigation to appropriate support.
Our Key Users
Insights
Users wanted visible milestones and feedback mechanisms that could validate their efforts and encourage continuity in their mental health journey
"It's hard to stay motivated when I don't know if I'm making progress. I want to see some kind of indicator that I'm improving."
Following a series of in-depth interviews and the development of detailed personas, we were able to distill our findings into several key insights that revealed factors contributing to the low engagement and retention rates
"I would be much more inclined to use the app regularly if the lessons grabbed my attention more—like with videos or podcasts."
Across the board, users were seeking more engaging ways to interact with the app. The preference for video and audio content over text was a clear indicator that multimedia could be a powerful tool for re-engagement
"Sometimes I open the app and just feel overwhelmed. I'd prefer just one thing to focus on each day."
Users indicated that a simplified daily engagement model, such as a single lesson or activity per day, could reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed and increase the likelihood of consistent app use
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
Neurum Health needed to implement a design strategy that provided users with clear progress indicators, a more manageable daily engagement approach, and immersive bite-sized content that fits into their busy lives.
Understanding the
Journey
To address the user experience challenges identified in our research, we employed a strategic combination of SCAMPER techniques and "How Might We" (HMW) questions to spur creative thinking and ideation. This approach enabled us to reframe the problems into opportunities for innovation.
Utilizing SCAMPER, we systematically explored various ways to Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Rearrange features within the app. Each SCAMPER prompt was paired with a corresponding HMW question to ensure that our solutions remained focused on addressing the specific needs and pain points of our users.
User Flows & Wireframes
To quickly visualize our ideas and establish the layout's hierarchy, I crafted low-fidelity wireframes and accompanying user flows. These preliminary sketches and flows allowed us to iterate rapidly and align our design concepts with the user insights we had gathered, ensuring a logical and seamless navigation path through the app.
With a set of wireframes and user flows in hand, I developed a quick prototype that could be navigated and interacted with.
This prototype was essential for testing the efficacy of our proposed solutions in a tangible way.
To validate our solutions, I employed MAZE—an online platform that facilitates user flow testing. Through MAZE, we could collect actionable data on how real users interacted with the prototype, gaining insights into the intuitiveness of the navigation and the overall user experience.
Testing Prototypes
Final Solutions
Feedback and Progress Incentives
Mind Health Score: Developed to allow users to track their overall mental health progress. The Mind Health Score provided users with a tangible metric, reflecting their activity within the app
Daily Progress Streaks: We introduced a system that rewards users with a streak for completing a lesson or practicing a tool each day. This gamified element aimed to incentivize daily app interaction and create a sense of achievement.
Visual Progress Forecasting: Crafted a visualization of users' mental health trends, providing a forecast derived from user data to set clear expectations for progress.
Tailored Weekly Check-Ins: Instituted weekly check-ins where users review their actual Mind Health Score against the forecast. Users receive congratulations for exceeding expectations or encouragement with customized advice if they are behind their predicted milestones.
To address the issue of users seeking visible milestones and feedback mechanisms, we developed a set of features tailored to validate their efforts and promote ongoing engagement:
Today Tab
The initial design of Neurum's home Tab, which showcased multiple ongoing programs, was overwhelming for many users. This cluttered experience led to a sense of confusion and a decrease in app engagement.
A Focused Approach: we introduced the "Today" tab which simplifies daily engagement. This dedicated page functions like a daily checklist, presenting users with a clear and manageable set of tasks for the day.
Program Engagement: A significant change we made was limiting users to one active program at a time. This deliberate limitation ensures that users can devote their attention to completing one program before moving on to the next, thereby promoting a sense of progress and completion.
Old "Home" tab
Completed Today view
Added new "Today" tab with a simplified view of tasks for users to complete
Immersive Content Delivery
Understanding the constraints of our users' busy lives, we recognised the need for a shift in our content delivery to foster a more engaging and efficient learning experience.
Bite-Sized Lessons: We trimmed content into smaller, more manageable lessons that users can quickly consume, facilitating a sense of accomplishment and fitting easily into busy schedules.
Multimedia Content: We moved away from text-heavy material to a more varied and immersive experience that caters to different learning preferences.
Animated Tools: The animations for our breathing and meditation exercises were upgraded to be more visually engaging, making these tools not only useful but also a more enjoyable part of our users' daily mental health practices.
KPI's & Results
The implementation of the "Today" page and the focused user engagement strategy has yielded promising early results. Summary of the initial outcomes:
DAU Increase: A significant 15% rise in Daily Active Users
Retention Rate Uplift: The 7-day retention rate has jumped by 20%
Task Completion : Task completion rates have escalated by 70%, demonstrating that users are actively engaging with the simplified daily tasks
Trial Feedback: Overwhelmingly positive feedback from a one-week trial; 90% of potential client employees signaled they would use the app and believe it would benefit their wellbeing.
My involvement with Neurum extended beyond the scope of a single project; it was an integral component of a more extensive initiative to elevate the product and its offerings. Throughout these projects, my approach was always grounded in insights-led and data-driven design choices. Here are some of my key learnings & takeaways:
Takeaway
Embracing Simplicity: Mental health is a complex and sensitive area, especially for those new to acknowledging and confronting their issues. The design must facilitate ease of understanding and clarity in task execution and user flows. Users already grappling with stress and overwhelm require an interface that doesn't add to their cognitive load but rather provides a calming, straightforward path to support.
Recognising Progress: Mental health improvement is often gradual and intangible in the short term. Users may not immediately perceive the benefits of their efforts, which can be discouraging. A key takeaway was the importance of visualizing progress and acknowledging users' efforts. Celebrating small victories and consistent efforts can significantly bolster engagement, inspiring users to persist in their journey even when immediate changes in their well-being are subtle.
Engagement Beyond Tools: No matter how committed a user is to to improving their mental health, the solution must be engaging. With attention being a scarce commodity nowadays, content must captivate and hold attention amidst the sea distractions in their lives. To truly resonate and be effective, the product must not only educate but also engage.
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