Caus: Designing Experiences That Value Mental Health.
Caus design studio was started by two fairly opposite people. As co-founders we’re constantly trading places in our thought processes; one of us laser-focused while the other is stepping back to connect a hundred ideas into one. Our collaboration is rooted in a shared, insatiable drive to solve problems. Which to us, is what building good products is all about.
Our attitude towards mental health has always been firmly aligned, too. Bradley, co-founder of Caus, battled anxiety, depression, and eating disorders through much of his teen years. I’ve had my share of nights waking up like my chest may catch fire with panic. Looking back further, I can see anxiety’s been hanging around me since I was much younger. As individuals we hadn’t always been good at talking about these bits, much less recognising them ourselves. But, through listening and taking the leap to share our experiences more frequently, we began to understand the priority level of mental wellness.
This openness made us a powerful team and resulted in strong work, even for the few years we were colleagues before beginning our own company. Our willingness to be vulnerable about our whole selves was a value we knew would be a pillar of how Caus lived and breathed.
We were fortunate enough in the early months of Caus to land some great clients, and worked steadily on a range of products in EdTech, FinTech, and AR. Alongside these projects, a notable amount of teams with focuses around suicide prevention, grief in children, or stronger familial connections were knocking on our door.
Including a handful of the 80+ previous products we’d built together before starting Caus, a pattern in the type of work we were attracting emerged. Not only were products in support of mental health finding us; we loved working on them. We wondered if (hoped) we could afford to focus exclusively on them, but the possibility felt like a far away concept, too good to be plausible.
This month, we took the leap. And following the decision to become a product design studio focused on mental health, the clarity spread across our entire business. After years of product work and months of building our company, Caus had truly arrived.
In the midst of narrowing our focus, our value-add simultaneously widened. The clearer our mission became, the more applications we defined and naturally divided into four main houses.
1. Workshops
We quickly identified the social stigma around mental health as a primary remaining barrier. Even if the perfect product existed — there would still be the social undertow that tells many of us mental health isn’t something to consider. What’s the use in building mental health products if so many of us still can’t acknowledge that we need them?
There is a conversation to be nurtured and an understanding to encourage by engaging with people outside of just building a product.
Through face to face workshops with product teams, not only are we introducing tangible mental health design principles for designers to learn from and implement; we’re doing our part in fostering a better dialogue around mental health in the industries and companies we touch.
2. Product Design
Although there are a large number of mental health and wellness apps on the market, we began to realise there was often a common thread — many products either lack the science but are great to use, or, have the science but are difficult to engage with. In either case, this leads to a low-impact experience.
In order to combat this, we’ve assembled a board of mental health professionals to collaborate with, and are investing in psychology courses for all of our team members to ensure that our products strike the perfect balance. Baking the right science into our years of UI/UX experience, we aim to create products with rock solid strategy, seamless interactions, and resources that actually improve users’ wellness.
Building an app may not always be the answer; exploring alternative pathways in tech is critical to ensuring we’re choosing the right solution — not just the one we’re used to choosing.
3. Consultation
Tech surrounds us, and we know it’s effecting our mental health. Products, even ones who have no direct tie to a mental health need, can still be mental health friendly. For example, when products don’t offer the user a clear pathway to a task they’re trying to complete, or an obvious way to exit out of an activity, this increases anxiety. This is an effective tactic, but for ultimately toxic reasons.
There are few resources around how to implement this type of product psychology, and similarly an overwhelming amount of products that are exploiting users’ thought patterns to encourage engagement. We believe this can be different, and remain beneficial for product teams and users alike.
Whether it’s an Enterprises’ internal CRM, or only a subset of features being released into a product — we’re here to ensure, through researched design principles, that the interactions aren’t straining a users’ mental wellness.
4. Research
Learning how best to support mental health is a never-ending process that involves surrounding ourselves with people who are smarter than us. We’re building a circle of professionals in tech, inclusion, psychology, child development, and addiction recovery to support a diverse and informed conversation around our developing knowledge.
Caus also now dedicates a portion of our time to doing our own education and research in how to most effectively build tech that supports mental health, to publish with anyone and everyone quarterly.
In researching and sharing findings, methodologies, and design patterns — we aim not only to better ourselves for our clients, but help to increase access to better resources across the industry.
Above any concise service offering, we want to be challenging ourselves and others to increase their empathy, and consider how the decisions we’re making in the experiences we create — are effecting mental health. Recognizing the value of mental wellness is not going away, despite efforts to build our world while stepping around it.
Without knowing what the future holds, or how tech may evolve — we’re eager to contribute to the discussion and evolution. And we don’t plan to know all the answers any time soon. But we do know that we’ve found that mythical place between our skillsets earned after years of work, and an area based purely in passion, to build a company that we believe in.
We look forward to sharing our journey and learnings at every step, and making our dent in supporting mental wellness in our changing world.
