Desi Minds | How we launched the first mental health course for South Asians.
What is Desi Minds?
Desi Minds enables the South Asian (SA)community to learn about their mental health through inclusive education. The term ‘desi’ refers to an individual from a South Asian background.
I started Desi Minds last April, initially starting as a fortnightly newsletter and transforming into an educational start-up running online courses and events. At the beginning of 2021, we secured funding and launched an online mental health course specifically for the SA community. Below, I’ve outlined how we progressed from idea to launch and what I learnt along the way.
The Approach
Launching a new product or service is both exciting and intimidating. Fortunately, I have several years of experience in e-learning in marketing and product management, so this wasn’t my first rodeo. Plus from working in start-ups, I was used to juggling multiple responsibilities so was ready to act as founder, UX researcher, marketer, designer and many more roles!
I based my product development roadmap on the design thinking process and focused on the user and their needs. Initially, most of my time and effort was focused on digging into the customer problem.
1. Uncovering and defining the user problem
From being a psychology graduate and an Indian woman, I knew the SA community struggled to talk about/ care for their mental health for several reasons- this wasn’t a new problem. However, I didn't know the nuances behind this and enough about the ‘why’.
Organically, I began to learn more about this & conduct discovery research. For two and half years, I volunteered for Taraki and co-created the Punjabi Female Forum — a monthly event for Punjabi women to listen and share in a safe space.
Through this and connecting with similar SA communities, I gained important insights into how the SA community cared for their mental health and validated some key assumptions. I collated my research, wrote many draft user stories and finally defined the key user problem:
“As a South Asian, I want to learn about my mental health inclusively, so I understand myself better and can care for my wellbeing.”
Let’s break down the user story and dig into what it means.
The customer goal
“As a South Asian individual, I want to learn about my mental health inclusively…
To clarify what ‘learning inclusively’ meant, I split this into two smaller user goals defining how users learn and what about.
- Users want to learn in an inclusive space where they can be their authentic selves.
Students want to avoid feeling othered or code-switching. Feeling excluded can prevent students from completing courses & advancing. - Users want to learn about their mental health from an inclusive & intersectional lens.
Psychological theories and services have been created mainly from a eurocentric/ western perspective, therefore rarely factor in other cultures’ experiences and needs. And on the occasions they do, communities can be stereotyped and seen as one homogeneous group. This can lead to many groups, especially BIPOC, feeling excluded and misunderstood. Users want to learn about content that is relevant to them and factors in their background and culture.
The customer outcome
“…So I understand myself better and know how to look after my wellbeing.”
Due to the tremendous complexity of mental health & SA culture, defining one clear outcome users wanted was difficult — often users wanted several positive outcomes so I prioritised the top two. After defining the user problem, I listed existing solutions and why they weren’t solving the user problem (see image above). This helped me move on to the next step- building the right solution.
2. Developing the right solution
User Research
As a SA who’s struggled with their mental health, it was very tempting to create a course based on my assumptions and experiences. However as any good product manager knows, user research is essential. To validate my initial idea, I created a landing page that shared a brief course outline and allowed users to join the course waitlist. After sharing the page on Desi Minds’s twitter, within 5 days I had over 100 people signed up! Boom.
Following this, I conducted research through surveys and interviews to understand how users wanted to learn about their mental health, from practicalities such as ideal cohort size to what content should be included.
From the data, I summarised the key insights and produced a rough curriculum and course plan.
Developing the course curriculum
When developing a new feature or product, I’m used to working with developers and discussing technical requirements. For the Desi Minds’ course, I swapped developers for doctors which was exciting and refreshing. I hired two incredible lead teachers, Dr Kultjit Bhogal and Dr Tina Mistry to help shape the curriculum & teach the students.
To finalise the course curriculum and aims, I ran an ideation workshop on what topics to include, our approach and how lessons were structured. A key insight identified was that users wanted to feel part of a safe, open community, so through activities such as ‘reverse brainstorming’ and mind-mapping, we created safeguarding values to help achieve this.
Another important outcome was agreeing our curriculum would be strength-based and empowering. There are serious issues around mental health within the SA community that shouldn’t be ignored or undermined. However, instead of focusing on what we lack within our community, we’ll be looking at our unique strengths and how these are assets in helping us care for our mental health.
Success metrics
Normally to measure the success (or failure) of a new feature/product, I analyse digital data such as conversion rate or review A/B test results to guide what to do next. These metrics weren’t appropriate for a live online course- I had to go back to the drawing board and ask myself ‘what does success look like?’
After some research, I decided on two primary user metrics to track:
- Customer satisfaction score
This seemed like a no-brainer and would be easy to track and measure through feedback forms. - ‘New knowledge acquired’ score
Essentially, I wanted to quantify how much users were learning about mental health on the course. This was key to tracking if the course’s aims were being fulfilled.
After graduating, I worked in Bangladesh for a few months running educational programmes. To evaluate what users learned from the programme, my team and I would share a set of statements at the beginning of a workshop and ask participants to rank their knowledge/ confidence level. After running the workshop, we’d ask participants to rank their knowledge again and see if the score had improved. It was an effective way to understand how successful the workshop had been and if anything needed to be explained further. I replicated this process for the Desi Minds’s course and sent a pre and post-course survey with a set of statements.
Alongside building the course, I worked with a brilliant agency to create my website and marketed the course through emails and Twitter. I hit my target of 15 students signing up within 2 weeks of officially launching- we were finally ready to start teaching!
3. Delivering the course
Feedback & learning
To learn about the course performance and how we could improve, it was essential to collect regular feedback from our students. Feedback forms and posting in our slack community was a friendly, low-effort way to do this.
A key early piece of feedback was for lessons to be more interactive and longer. Initially, we’d planned for the lessons to be 1.5 hours and assumed any longer may lead to zoom fatigue. In practice, this wasn’t long enough- our first cohort was made up of incredible, supportive and compassionate individuals who wanted to share and discuss. I underestimated how much being part of a community and sharing stories helped people learn.
Halfway through the course, we increased lessons to two hours and included more time for discussion and interactive activities. This small change helped the class flow better and enabled us to cover more content. I loved how quickly and easily we could action feedback and see improvements.
Key reflections
Running the course involved lots of hard work and fun collaborations. Here are my key takeaways.
- Getting regular user feedback is difficult
Let’s face it, providing feedback can be boring. It was challenging to get students to fill in regular feedback forms. Next time around, offering an incentive or asking students to fill in forms during class may lead to a better uptake. - My success metrics could have been better
On reflection, my CSAT metric was quite reductionist. It’s tempting to see a high rating and deem the course a success, but this doesn’t show the full picture. Speaking to students and reading detailed answers enabled me to learn what students liked/ disliked. This is something to revise for the second cohort and allocate more time for. - Inclusivity is POWERFUL.
Inclusivity has become an empty buzzword (especially in tech) and is often written/spoken about without any authenticity/ genuine knowledge- this deeply frustrates me. Running this course and seeing our students thrive, reminded me of how powerful inclusivity actually is and why it must be embedded into product development.
In conclusion…
Overall, our first-ever course was a success (read some of our reviews here). Reading the students’ positive feedback was heartwarming and made me feel incredibly proud of what we had achieved. A big thank you to our students and the incredible Desi Minds team for helping make this happen. This is just the beginning- watch this space for some more courses!
To find out more about Desi Minds click here or email serena@desiminds.co.uk. Liked this article? Send me a tweet.
