WAVE
A recursive dictation journaling app with AI analysis tools in partnership with Sun Life.
My role
Design Lead
Team size
6 people
Timeline
4 months
Tools
Figma, FigJam, & Procreate
Project overview
As part of my senior capstone project, we partnered with Sun Life to create a digital solution to close the gender gap in mental health care. Alongside my team, including Arshyan Tayyab, Aykas Bhons, Brock Beatty, Bhumi Patel, and Carter Richer, we merged the fields of business, research, and design to create WAVE, a recursive dictation journaling app with AI analysis tools tailored for women aged 25-44 with bipolar disorder.
Within my team, I assumed the role of Design Lead, overseeing the entire visual design of the application. My responsibilities include drawing storyboards, creating low-fidelity wireframes, establishing a design system to ensure cohesiveness, designing application screens, providing feedback to other designers on the team, and assisting with user testing.
While I played a significant role in designing the majority of the screens, there were instances where I took a less prominent role, particularly in the onboarding and recording flows. Nonetheless, these screens were still developed utilizing the design system and language I established for the team.
Problem
Partnering with Sun Life, the company's case problem raised significant concerns regarding the gender gap in mental health care and the insurance industry, particularly for women aged 25 - 44 who suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, and sleep problems.
Upon narrowing down our target audience, we found that the recommended number of therapy sessions for women suffering from bipolar disorder aged 25-44 is 12-30 per year. However, common insurance plans typically only allow for 3-5 covered sessions each year. Many roadblocks come with traditional therapy. Speaking with our users, they often find it difficult to remember everything they want to say, feel uncomfortable retelling a negative experience, or feel like the session was ineffective due to time constraints. These roadblocks, paired with the limited number of covered therapy sessions, leave users in a difficult position.
On the flip side, other support methods outside of traditional therapy, such as mental health apps, are too restrictive and lack personalization. As a result, users are left with incomprehensive mental health support due to the insufficiency of their provided resources.
Goal
Our goal is to bridge existing gaps in mental health support services for bipolar disorder. We aim to empower individuals suffering from bipolar disorder to understand and navigate their emotions with confidence and strength by delivering sustainable mental health support.
After speaking with SunLife, the goals for this project include:
Bridge gaps in mental health support services for individuals with bipolar disorder.
Empower individuals with bipolar disorder to understand and navigate their emotions with confidence and strength through sustainable mental health support.
Develop a viable product that directly addresses users' concerns and needs related to managing bipolar disorder.
Solution
WAVE is a bespoke solution centred around recursive dictation journaling with AI analysis tools. This platform provides a safe and efficient way for users to document emotions, reflect, and share insights with friends, family, and professionals. With WAVE, users can now record, reflect, and connect.
Focusing on dictation journaling, WAVE addresses the need for accessible mental health support for bipolar disorder. The recursive dictation and AI analysis tools offer a personalized journaling experience that fosters self-awareness and emotional empowerment.
Our speech-to-text functionality makes it easy for individuals to capture their thoughts and emotions, especially those who struggle with traditional written forms due to cognitive or physical challenges. Additionally, the AI analysis tools provide valuable insights into mood patterns and triggers, helping users understand their mental health journey and make informed self-care decisions.
WAVE also fosters stronger connections with users' support systems through summarized entries and complements traditional therapy by enhancing self-reflection and progress tracking between sessions.
Project successes
Through our efforts, my team and I successfully tackled Sun Life's case problem and created an application that provides everyday support for women aged 25 - 44 with bipolar disorder. WAVE addresses the challenges our users face, offering them an intuitive and personalized solution that complements traditional therapy and enhances its effectiveness.
Selected as one of the top 5 teams in our cohort, we had the opportunity to present WAVE to a panel of professionals at Sun Life's XD Month.
Design process
Discovery research
Conduct secondary research to learn more about the problem space.
Create a persona
Based on research results, a persona was created to identify the specific users, along with their pain points.
Feature mapping & user flows
Map out the product features and user flows according to the persona's needs, using FigJam.
Storyboard
Create a storyboard to show how the user will interact with the app and in what situations, using Procreate.
Create an MVP
Draw layouts and note down the interactions as an MVP, using Procreate.
Design system
Develop a design system in Figma to create a cohesive visual language.
High-fidelity prototype
Create a high-fidelity prototype with interactions in Figma.
User testing
Conduct user testing with professionals, therapists, and users with bipolar disorder.
Apply feedback
Apply the user testing feedback to a new design iteration.
Persona
Lauren Stacy is a 26-year-old business analyst from Halifax who recently moved to Toronto to start a new job. Lauren also has bipolar disorder.
Moving to a new city, starting a new job, and leaving family and friends can be overwhelming for anyone, but it is especially challenging for those with bipolar disorder, where consistency in schedules and systems is vital. Any disruptions in these routines can have negative effects.
Finding a new therapist isn't easy for Lauren either. She struggles to open up to new people and often forgets what she wants to discuss, making therapy sessions feel unproductive.
Lauren needs a day-to-day solution that provides sustainable mental health support, helping her reflect on and manage her emotions while staying connected to her support system.
Feature mapping & user flows
Feature mapping
After understanding who our persona is, our group facilitated product feature mapping, pinpointing different application aspects that we must include, should include, could include, and completely exclude. This helped narrow down the core purpose of our application, as an overload of features can cause it to lose its value. When an application tries to become too many things, it no longer resonates with the target audience.
User flows
After identifying our core product features, we created user flows for the application. This helps us pinpoint where and when the user may have to make a decision, and, in turn, what kind of screens need to be created for each decision path.
Storyboard
This storyboard narrates the user journey of our persona, Lauren. It showcases the situation Lauren is in, as well as how she will interact with the app throughout the day.
Low-fidelity wireframes
Design system
Initial colour palette
The combination of purple, green, and white represents women's empowerment. Additionally, green is the official representative colour for mental health awareness. The intention for this initial palette was to use colours that strongly relate to case problems revolving around women and mental health. The colour palette also utilizes muted tones, creating a calm effect. It was also important to choose high-contrast colours to ensure accessibility.
In theory, this colour palette is a great choice; however, when put into action, the purple and the green ended up looking muddy when used in a gradient.
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New colour palette
In the new colour palette, purple is still utilized to represent women's empowerment. However, the green has now been swapped with a blue. This blue shade still projects the calm atmosphere that was created with the original palette. Since blue is associated with water, this colour also creates a stronger correlation to our app name, WAVE. The tone and saturation of the colours were also changed to prevent them from looking muddy when used in a gradient. Purple and blue can sometimes look similar, however, these high-contrast shades were strategically chosen to ensure accessibility.
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User testing
Methodology
Through user testing, our team conducted seven formal sessions using the Rainbow spreadsheet method involving professionals, therapists, and individuals with bipolar disorder. Users completed six tasks within WAVE alongside several surveys to gain further insight. We explored their experiences, obtaining insights into the objectives of our users. This comprehensive approach informed design decisions within our prototype, ensuring its alignment with the real needs of our target demographic.
In addition, we conducted a co-design session with a user who has bipolar disorder, helping us reimage our input system for emotions to better reflect the real world.
Importance of co-design
Through a co-design session with a classmate diagnosed with bipolar, we uncovered invaluable findings that could inform the future of our application, insights of which not even professionals within the field were able to identify. This illustrates the importance of co-design not only in the early stages of development but for the future of the product as a whole.
Improvements
Informed onboarding
With our informed onboarding process, the feature is designed to help familiarize users with the primary features of WAVE and how to use them. However, we found that even those who went through the entirety of the onboarding process struggled with understanding app-specific features such as "Recaps". We needed users to understand not only how to use the feature but also why it is important.
Reflective insights
We also enhanced our reflective insights, a feature that our users believed was highly valuable as it helps them identify and reflect on the specific causes of their emotions. In version 1, we initially used a 3-dot icon that users must click on to travel between pages; however, this interaction was not as intuitive as we hoped. Therefore, for version 2, we redesigned the navigation system using a pill-style menu for better clarity.
Send button
The last feature we significantly improved based on our user testing is our send button. Since sending recaps is a core feature of WAVE, we want to ensure that users can easily identify how to share their information with friends, family, and therapists. However, from our testing, some users didn't recognize the original button as a send button or found it too small to interact with.
Final prototype
Onboarding process
Our onboarding process requires users to first read through the privacy policy. Since our app deals with sensitive information, it is important for users to fully understand the situation using simplified language. Next, users have the option to go through a guided tour, which helps them become familiar with app-specific features.
Recording a memo
With just a click of a button, users can easily record a memo anytime, anywhere. If they find themselves in a situation where speaking out loud feels uncomfortable, users also have the option to type in their journals. Before submission, users can edit their entries. However, it's important to note that users cannot edit their journals after submission, preserving the rawness of their emotions.
Reflective insights
Our insights feature enhances the reflection process necessary in the journaling cycle. The high-contrast, colour-coded calendar layout provides a high-level overview of the user's emotions throughout the month. Users can then access more in-depth insights with graphs, day-by-day breakdowns, and professionally recommended strategies.
Recap sending
To stay connected with their support system and keep them informed, users can send Recaps: a condensed version of their reflective insights. With end-to-end encryption, Recaps can securely be sent to anyone with a WAVE account, including family, friends, and even therapists.
Push notifications
To motivate users, this will be done through push notifications. Users have the ability to determine how many journal entries they want to record in a day, as well as the time to do so.
Next steps
Desktop web service
As a next step, we would like to develop a desktop version of WAVE. With the advantage of a larger screen size, users will have the capability to view more data at once, allowing for greater detail and granularity. From the perspective of therapists, a desktop interface offers an optimal view of their patient's data.
During our post-user testing interviews, 75% of respondents expressed their belief that a desktop version of WAVE would significantly improve data access and analysis. They also indicated that compared to the mobile version, a desktop interface would enhance the overall data analysis experience.
New emotional metrics
In user testing, we discovered that individuals found our emotional input system limiting due to the nature of our 5-point scale. This input method did not properly reflect the complexity found in real-world situational emotions. Our proposed solution is an input system that requests both emotional type and intensity value, as depicted in the image below. This system is intended to enhance granularity and flexibility in digital emotion representation, consequently influencing data presentation to the user. Due to time constraints, we could not fully design this feature into our high-fidelity prototype as the issue arose late in user testing and will require a substantial redesign from scratch.
