ALTEA: Your Support System In Your Healing Journey
Hello readers, I’m Rumi, a Mental Health Coach and this is my story. It’s an enlightening one💡so make sure to pay attention!
Transforming Struggle into Strength: A Journey to Mental Health Coach
Before I started working professionally 8 years ago, I suffered from a neurodevelopmental disorder called ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) which further caused me to have anxiety disorder, eating disorder and disruptive sleeping pattern. This made my adolescence, teenage and early adulthood very difficult. Mental health was an even bigger taboo back then and it was almost impossible to find anyone around who was talking about mental health or even mentioning it. Few grasped the true seriousness of this issue.
Nevertheless, I eventually embarked on my healing journey towards mental health.
After some time, I realised my ultimate goal in life lies within helping other people succeed in their mental health journey so I studied to become a certified mental health coach.
What I saw as the end was just the start of my next journey. After practicing as a mental health coach I came across many people who were suffering in silence because of the fear of societal stigma, before finally seeking the help they needed.
Research
So, I decided to dig deep in this and find out more about it.
My Findings:
1. Treatment gap in India is staggering, with barely 9,000 psychiatrists and 3,372 clinical psychologists in a country of 1.3 billion people.
2. Psychological care accounts for a miniscule 1% of India’s health-care budget.
3. There are a lot of myths revolving around mental health which highly contributes in making it a stigma. For eg: People with mental illness are violent.
5. Rural India has limited access to mental health care. Mental health care facilities are usually not available at the village level, and even when they are, they are often too far away for people to travel regularly for therapies and treatments.
These facts were enough for me to decide that this problem needs to be solved. The current age of internet and technology was in our favour. In present time when people spend more time looking at a digital screen, than looking outside at physical world, we knew that our solution had to be somewhere in there as well. So, I started gathering more data to define the problem.
This was a Challenge!
Gathering data proved to be quite challenging, particularly given the sensitive nature of mental health in India. Initially, my direct approach yielded biased and unproductive results, leading to some setbacks. However, through brainstorming sessions and insightful discussions with industry experts, I refined my approach and successfully collected the necessary data.
I started with defining my potential users. These will be the people who need our help, our design solution.
Who is our user:
1. A person looking to seek medical/professional help.
2. A person who wants to learn more about mental illness and issues through medical professionals and people experiencing these.
3. A person who is seeking a community to share about their own experience with mental health.
Survey
We picked the route of survey to select our users for further research. This survey included questions from well researched and widely practiced questionnaire forms like GAD-7 (General Anxiety Disorder Assessment 7), PHQ-9 (Patient Health Questionnaire-9) and Mental Health Questions for Patients.
This survey gave us the expected result, i.e. our users.
User Interviews
Now, it was time to get real. We had a good base of data to get started and participants. So it was time to get real insights from actual users about their problems.
What we want to learn from user interviews:
1. What is the level of awareness among users regarding their own mental health.
2. How are they approaching it.
3. What will make them feel more comfortable talking about their mental health.
Insights gathered from user interviews:
Affinity Mapping
We organised these insights into clusters based on a common theme or a pattern they displayed.
Frankly, I found myself initially overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information collected and found it difficult to discern its value. While not every detail proved relevant to us, we were able to summarise the rest into insightful and easy to understand points:
1. Users are afraid to talk about their feelings and thoughts because they feel like they will be judged for having them.
2. Some users who did open up about their feelings, they were discriminated against, taunted and blamed for their situation.
3. Some users feel that their bad mental health is just a phase and not a permanent thing.
4. Some users would feel more comfortable if people could actually give them helpful advice.
5. Users feel like they can open up with someone who doesn’t judge them and try to understand the situation from their perspective.
6. Users don’t feel supported by people around them.
7. Users understand their recurring negative emotions but they don’t try to tackle it as they are not aware of the root problem, they rather deal with the problem on a surface level.
8.Most users have not sought medical help because of reasons like they don’t think it’s necessary, no access to good medical professionals and they do not want to put efforts. Some users are planning to get medical/professional help.
Problem Statement
Based on our research we can clearly define our problem in mentioned words:
People with bad mental health need a way to have conversations around it to better understand and navigate through their situation because they feel isolated as no one around them understands their issues.
Now, we have a clear idea of our problem. It’s time to start with our solution.
Solution
Firstly we need a name which aligns with the vision of our solution. After a few google searches we decided on
“ALTEA”. This is a name from greek origin which means, “Healer”
Information Architecture
Now we started mapping out a structure, an architecture which will bring us a lot closer to our solution. This is what is looks like:
Features
Our app will broadly have three features:
1. Professional: Users can come and book consultations with medical professionals.
2. Coach: Users can find mental wellness coaches and book consultations with them to seek guidance during their mental health journey in order to achieve their life goals.
3. Community: Users can find posts by professionals, coaches and other users sharing their thoughts, knowledge, information and experiences related to mental health.
Wireframes
We started the solution part by making wireframes to put our vision into some shape and form.
After a lot of iterations and going back & forth with things, we decided to stop at this point.
1. Onboarding Flow
2. Main Screens
3. Search Functionality
3(a). For Professional
3(b). For Coach
3(c). For Community
4. Create a Post
5. Book Session with Professional
6. Book Session with Coach
Final Screens
When we were satisfied with the wireframes we moved on to decide our typography, color theme and content. And this is how final screens turned out:
1. Onboarding Flow
2. Main Screens
3. “i” Button Description
4. Search Functionality
4(a). For Professional
4(b). For Coach
4(c). For Community
5. Create a Post
6. Book Session with Professional
6. Book Session with Coach
“Rumi stops here! Next section is meeee :XD”
What I learned
1. Solution: There are lot of areas to expand, for example, separate onboarding and dashboards for Coaches and Professionals is a good direction for further exploration.
2. Methodological Growth: I learned how different UX methods can serve various roles according to the problem statement, each effectively extracting unique types of information from users.
3. Iteration: UX Designing is truly an iterative process at its core, so its utterly important to understand when to stop. It’s a never ending process and we can always come back and improve.
Thank You For Patiently Reading :D
