Edgewood
Accessible Mental Healthcare App
ROLE
UX designer
METHODS & TOOLS
User Research
Sketches
Prototype
Vimeo
Figma
Excalidraw
Canva
TEAMMATES
Abbey Hastings
Emily Walker
Lily Xu
Natalie Lindquist
TIMELINE
24 hours
CONTEXT
BACKGROUND
Girls in Tech, San Francisco hosted their 5th annual hackathon, Hacking for Humanity. This year the focus was on mental health, and three different organizations proposed their own challenges. Of the three, my team and I chose to work with Edgewood Center for Children and Families. Their proposed problem statement was…
How might we scale our ability to serve more children and families as we face a nationwide shortage in trained pediatric clinicians and an escalating crisis in anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses?
RESEARCH
With 24 hours and a team of 5 designers, we decided to rely on more secondary research and some additional context provided by Edgewood.
CLIENT GOALS
In addition to the problem statement, Edgewood Board Member, Julie Supan, and Director of Advancement, Gregg Biggs, provided a few desired outcomes for a mobile or web-based solution.
Enable us to treat several people at a time
Offer crisis support and/or provide comfort in time of need
Deliver information or care plans to educate, inform, and help stay on top of care
USER STORIES
I led a whiteboarding-style brainstorming session, where we dug deeper into the purpose and impact of this project. We also looked into the Edgewood’s client demographics and noted personal anecdotes of facing mental illnesses or struggling as a parent seeking pediatric healthcare.
Instead of using a traditional user journey map with a persona, we developed three user stories and walked through each to give us a better look at how different users might navigate different situations.
DEFINE
DESIGN REQUIREMENTS
With Edgewood and users’ goals in mind, we detailed a few features that would initially be the most impactful.
streamlined intake
The lack of trained pediatric clinicians is not easy to solve, but a streamlined onboarding can save users and clinicians time. Users, parents or children, likely have busy schedules, where hours of form-filling is daunting.
supplement resources
Through our user stories and details from Edgewood, we discovered that access to resources are crucial for both patients and caretakers. However resources should not be a replacement for professional care.
flexible payment options
As Edgewood’s business model stands, only referred patients have access to Edgewood services. To scale their business model means to offer different options for people of different financial backgrounds to be able to receive the care they need.
immediate crisis support
Per Edgewood, ER visits in 2021 from children in mental health crises increased by 40%. From our teammates and those around us that have gone through mental health crises, we discovered that in a time of crisis, people need quick and easy access to support.
SITEMAP
With a better understanding of the users that we were designing for, we decided on a mobile app that would be the most accessible at any time, which was important for users in crisis. We started with a very rough sitemap, to get an idea of how the app would be organized and determine which screens are necessary and within our scope.
IDEATE
SKETCHES
We continued sketching with Excalidraw, where I focused primarily on the login and onboarding screens. I also pulled from the health care app that I personally use to sample a patient portal home screen. We rapid sketched for a bit and reconnected to share feedback on our screens and decide on screens with multiple iterations. Screens marked with a purple diamond were ones that we deemed necessary for our flow.
More sketches here!
UI KIT
We split off into two teams, one to work on UI and another to work on wireframes. I focused on wireframing, but continued to collaborate with our UI team on what assets we needed as we worked on the screens. I also ensured that our colors were accessibility friendly and form and button sizes were optimized.
SOLUTION
As our UI team was building out our kit, we designed low-fidelity wireframes, adding on the assets as they rolled out and tweaking as needed. We followed our design requirements and focused on key features that would build a comprehensive product that addressed the problem statement.
ONBOARDING FORM
The onboarding form allows users to fill out “paperwork” through their app. Users can also note symptoms and any clinician preferences through this process, which helps pair them with a clinician ahead of time and save clinicians time in understanding patients’ situations.
RESOURCE PORTAL
The portal provides resources for both patient's and guardians, though the content may differ by user. It is supplementary to treatment, so we didn’t flesh out the contents of these resources, but we still wanted it to be accessible.
PAYMENT GUIDE
Edgewood is looking to scale their payment options so we designed a payment guide that shows users the different options, including information about each option so users have clarity on what payment option is right for them.
CHATBOT
We developed the chatbot to address the need for immediate support. Despite it not being clinical care or treatment, it will give users a place to look that will be able to contact crisis support or redirect them to a counselor.
PROTOTYPE
Once our UI completed our high-fidelity wireframes, I went in to check all our screens, making sure all our colors, assets, and spacing were consistent. Then I linked up the prototype, so in the morning we could walk through it as a team and iterate as necessary.
VIDEO PRESENTATION
Our submission had to be in the form of 4 minute video presentation, including the pitch and walkthrough. With feedback from my teammates, I polished the prototype, as they started on the script and presentation slides. When we were all happy with the prototype, I jumped in to add screens to our slides and started on recording and editing our video.
REFLECTION
NEXT STEPS
In our presentation we mentioned that we’d like to add a clinician directory as well as a pay-it-forward feature. In addition, my personal instinct would be to have a client meeting to further understand their goals, so we could focus on the more immediate necessities that would actually help them scale their business. Our team conceptualized a lot of great ideas, and understanding more specific business needs would help us hone in on a good, usable foundational app that Edgewood can launch sooner than later. As for the final prototype, I made some aesthetic and consistency tweaks.
FINAL THOUGHTS
In retrospect, I would have liked to conduct primary research to get more insight on the users. Despite being limited on time, I think it would have been instrumental in also narrowing down our scope to build something really beneficial to users. Of course, with more time, I would have also loved to test our prototype. Our prototype covered a lot of ground so content-wise it’s not as fleshed out, but I would like to see how intuitive it is for users.
Still, within 24 hours, we designed an app that addresses a lot of problems that Edgewood was facing in their journey to scale the organization. I’m proud of the work we did in that short amount of time and incredibly grateful for this opportunity to work with a respectful, brilliant team.