Calm Space was a concept project that I decided to work on during the early months of the COVID Pandemic. The main purpose of the app was to provide instant & urgent mental health assistance by connecting credible & reliable psychologists with people who require it. Apart from that, ’Calm Space’ as the name suggests, would also provide users with an empathetic & therapeutic space & facilitate resources to improve their mental health
Background
“Need is the mother of all inventions”. Well, I did not invent something new, but I most certainly needed an app that could do what Calm Space is supposed to.
Mental Health found a fair bit of attention in common media ever since the pandemic started and people felt more isolated and anxious than ever. People lost their jobs, loved ones, and social circles & adjusted themselves to ‘the new normal’ but at an enormous cost to their mental well-being.
I was going through something similar myself. My last semester of Undergraduation had become virtual, my career plans had taken a massive hit considering I could not move out of the country, my health deteriorated and there was a lot of uncertainty & apprehension in the air in general. Nobody knew where the world would go from here, how long we would be confined in our own homes and spray over everything that came from outside. That’s when the idea of a ‘Calm Space’ felt most necessary.
I was still studying design and was looking for ideas for a project that I could get my hands on. Almost everyone I interacted with told me how they were suffering from anxiety, panic attacks & a constantly looming feeling of dread. This holistic feeling of doom started this project on an imaginary application, that everyone could use. But ‘everyone’ was too vague a term. Hence, I started out by understanding the problem space with a bit more depth & tried defining the target users of the app a bit better.
Design Process
Since it was a fictional project, I had ample time to dedicate to it. I wanted to develop a deep understanding of the problem I wanted to solve, the whys & the hows, and the users I was trying to solve it for. I wanted to reason and weigh potential ideas, understand the technicalities of an application better, et cetera. Hence, I decided to use the Classic Design Thinking approach which would give me enough time to focus on each step of the journey. Below is a quick explanation of what Design thinking is all about -
Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that involves understanding and empathizing with users, generating creative ideas, prototyping and testing solutions, and iterating on them based on feedback. Here are the typical steps involved in the design thinking process:
Empathize: This step involves understanding the needs and perspectives of the people for whom you are designing. It involves conducting research, interviews, and observations to gain deep insights into their experiences, challenges, & needs.
Define: In this step, you analyze & synthesize the information gathered during the empathy phase to define the core problem that you aim to address.
Ideate: This step involves generating a wide range of creative ideas to solve the defined problem. It encourages brainstorming, free-thinking, and open exploration of possibilities.
Prototype: Once you have a set of promising ideas, you create tangible representations or prototypes of those ideas. Prototypes can be physical models, sketches, storyboards, or even digital simulations.
Test: In this step, you gather feedback on your prototypes from the target users or stakeholders. The aim is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your solutions and identify areas for improvement. Testing can involve user interviews, observations, surveys, or usability tests.
Iterate: Based on the feedback received, you refine and improve your designs. This often involves going back to previous steps and repeating the process, making incremental changes, or exploring entirely new ideas.
Now that we have a shared understanding of what Design Thinking is all about, let’s see this project through the steps involved in the approach.
Empathizing
The Problem Statement
The unavailability & Inaccessibility of mental health assistance & resources to people who need it, is causing widespread mental distress and emotional unrest.
Psychotherapy remains an obscure luxury (both financially & technologically) for these people who certainly require its utility in the terrifying backdrop of a worldwide pandemic.
Understanding the Target Users
Those who wish to connect with credible & reliable therapists on a regular basis.
Those with suicidal tendencies & who require urgent mental care
Those who feel isolated & lonely and wish to be a part of a larger community
Defining the Purpose (or maybe not yet)
The next step was to define the purpose of the application, I wanted to first understand the priority of its uses. What did users want the most? But I simply could not assume what users wanted, I did have a vague idea about it, but in order to make the application useful, I had to delve deeper into that rabbit hole. Thus, I decided to conduct a survey.
Conducting Primary User Research
I was excited to do this survey as this is what ‘human-centered design’ was all about, and I was ready to learn how people felt about a hypothetical application that would make them feel at peace in such troubling times.
I prepared a questionnaire that I started circulating across various social media platforms & spaces - Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Facebook & Whatsapp groups, etc. The questionnaire was as such -
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I decided to stop sharing the questionnaire when responses totaled up to 100. which it did in about 43 days. The response demographics were as such-
Out of the 100 respondents, 61 were male & 39 were female.
The highest share of respondents (43) were from North America (mostly US) followed by Asia, Europe & just a couple of responses from Australia.
The majority of respondents (75) were in the age bracket of 18-25, followed by under 18 and 26-32 age brackets.
Our respondents came from diverse occupational backgrounds with the most common Occupation being Engineering or IT (32), closely followed by Students & Medicine.
All the respondents were aware of what Mental Health was essentially about.
Such a diverse sample definitely helped me understand all the different perspectives people from across the world had about mental health, tech’s role in it & what they would like to see in a mental health app. After analyzing the responses, I came to the following conclusions-
The survey results certainly gave me a direction to go in with this project. A lot of answers were definitive and cleared all the misconceptions that I had before conducting the survey. After munching the results, it was time to define the purpose of the application, again!
Defining the (Main/Central) Purpose
I now had clarity of uses and their significance for the potential end-users of the application. Since most respondents chose ‘Booking & Conducting Therapy Sessions’ as the most required feature of a mental health app, I decided to have it as the most prominent feature with other features, inculcated in a subtle, cohesive way that is also easy to consume and doesn’t try to do too much. Hence the purpose of the app was to ‘provide instant & urgent mental help/therapy by connecting credible & reliable therapists with people needing mental assistance’.
Now it was time to come up with ideas for further structuring & organizing the app.
Ideation
User Stories
Defining everyday users’ stories in the context of this project was important because they gave me a clear distinction of their pain points, frustrations, wants & needs in daily scenarios, here’s one -
This is Andrew, a 22-year-old Student living in a large Metro city. On usual days, Andrew’s swamped with assignments, projects & side jobs. When free, he prefers going out with friends, watching Football or just scrolling endlessly past Instagram Reels until he is exhausted.
With so much pressure to get good grades, pay off student loans, etc, he has to deal with Anxiety on a frequent basis. He also deals with Loneliness quite often as he lives away from his family in a fast urban setting.
This hectic lifestyle with little to no time to improve his mental well-being is very dangerous for him. He is edging close to burnout with every passing day.
Thus, Andrew needs an app that makes seeking help easy & accessible.
Empathy Map
Empathy Mapping helped me understand the users even better by visually presenting insights on what they see, hear, say, do, think & feel.
In this case, we’re going to look at Andrew from user stories and what he sees, says, does, thinks and feels. This will help us design a better, more personal & empathetic experience for him and more such.
User Flow
As the application would include completing several tasks, there would be many different user flows. But the main task was to ‘book therapy sessions seamlessly’ and ‘attend those sessions using the application’…the flow of it was as follows -
Card Sorting
Card sorting provides insights into how the content & sections can be bucketed throughout the app, enabling me to make an information architecture that makes sense to users.
Information Architecture
An elaborated diagram of how the information is organized throughout the app -
Prototyping
Wireframing
These are some of the initial sketches I made for some major screens including the entire Session Booking user flow.
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Color Scheme & Typography
I wanted the color palette to invoke feelings of peace, calm & tranquility for the users as the name of the app suggests. Hence I decided to select a range of colors with low saturation as they’re perceived as more relaxing. The colors are in order (left to right) of use throughout the app -
For typography, I decided to go with a combination of Serif & Sans Serif font as the main goals were good readability & beautification. So for smaller font sizes, I used Kumbh Sans while for Section Headings I used Rufina, and Page Headings & Logo were styled with Fredoka One.
High Fidelity Prototype
To experience the app better, click on the link below to access the interactive prototype. You can also view the high-fidelity screenshots in the gallery below.
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Testing
User Feedback was collected in the same manner I had collected the primary user data before, with the help of an online survey using the same social mediums. I decided to stop sharing the questionnaire when responses totaled up to 100. which it did in about 51 days. The questionnaire was as such -
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4052275b-80d5-4300-afd2-effdd3c06dbc_595x842.jpeg)
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Conclusion & Final Thoughts
This project was certainly more than just a Design Project for me as I feel strongly about the cause & motivation behind such an application. I definitely enjoyed it more because of that sentiment.
In terms of Design technicalities, it introduced me to several design exercises like User Stories, Card Sorting, etc which generated essential insights for me in the pursuit of this application. Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey & made this possible!
Big Thanks to Pablo Stanley for his Illustrations from ‘Happy Bunch’.
Hope you enjoyed reading this User Experience Design Case Study.
I would love to get your feedback & suggestions on this Project, feel free to hit me up at tarundixit.ux@gmail.com.
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