My background in psychology and cognition brought about interest in understanding our mental health and wellbeing. By leveraging my past knowledge and studies, I used my design problem thinking to bring about Seedling's first mental health growth journal.
The problem
Mental health affects everyone, but solutions are costly
It's 2022 and your mental health is at an all time low from being home for the last two years. Your online zoom meetings drag on for hours on end, and you start to wonder whether this is what life should be.
Maybe it's seriously time to consider your mental wellbeing.
However, upon scouring the internet for a variety of self-proclaimed help guides, flipping through some suspiciously targeted ads, and therapist session wait-times into the next decade, you start to feel pretty hopeless.
That's where Seedling comes in. Our mission is to provide users with a mental health journal that makes cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and dialectic behavioural therapy (DBT) exercises accessible to everyone.
THe DESIGN PROCESS
A journal that grows alongside you
In order to fulfill our mission in making mental health resources more accessible to everyone, I designed a 200-page journal filled with CBT/DBT exercises re-formatted, mindfulness exercises, bullet journal pages and calming plant illustrations that supplement our content.
In general, traditional CBT and DBT exercises can feel clinical and uninviting. Some users in our initial user interviews claimed that it made them less inclined to use these resources throughout their recovery.
We took on this challenge to design journal spreads that are both informative, warm, inviting, and yet structured to teach our users the techniques often found in CBT/DBT exercises.
I played a role in carrying conversations between research and design team, with focuses on how to turn these clinical and academic pieces of writing into more user-friendly experiences.
Our copy tone and voice are both straightforward and logical, yet inviting and understanding. This would be important in the delivery and effectiveness of our overall product.
The journal carries hand-drawn plant imagery that promotes biophillic design, in turn boosting the user's mental clarity and wellbeing.
Verify and validate with user testing
Surveys and interviews indicate...
To verify and validate our research and designs, we conducted user testing with the beta version of our journal. This included two surveys and one video interview. Upon conducting interviews and reviewing the survey results, we can conclude that the designs did have an overall positive impact on most users. However, there were areas in which we can improve, such as providing more references to our content and ensure that it is clear our product is not meant to replace any forms of professional mental health services.
Illustration
Biophillic designs
In addition to our journal content, it was also important to Seedling's mission that the products we provided were aesthetically pleasing.
I created a series of illustrations both for the inside journal content, as well as illustrations that served as stickers, to ensure our journal stuck to our brand identity full of plants and lovely foliage.
I loved being able to showcase my visual art skills alongside my psychology and design work!
