Magnolia

design project for EMPOWER 2022

Overview

Role: UI/UX design and research

Duration: 2 days (4/16/22 - 4/17/22)

Skills: Figma

Team: 3 designers

Background

The theme of Wellesley in Product’s designathon for 2022, EMPOWER, was to create a product that focused on helping people embrace their authentic selves. While our team was discussing ideas, a commonality that we all had within our families was that we were all Asian, and one of the foremost struggles we had with our Asian families was with discussions on mental health, as mental health is an extremely stigmatized topic in many Asian immigrant communities. As such, we created Magnolia, an app centered on providing resources to Asian immigrant parents meant to destigmatize conversations around mental health. We named the app Magnolia because the magnolia flower is a common remedy for anxiety, stress, and depression, which is symbolically the goal of our app.

This app won 2nd place out of 15 teams.

Goals

  • Decrease the language and cultural barrier surrounding mental health in Asian immigrant parents through informative, accessible articles.

  • Normalize seeking help for mental health. Mental health applies to everyone.

  • Equip Asian immigrant families with evidence-based tools to discuss mental health with their family.

User research

We first began by conducting user interviews on 5 Asian immigrants parents to gain more insight on their immigrant background, outlooks on mental health, and experience with using technology. From these interviews we created two personas that represented the needs that our interviewees communicated to us regarding our goal to destigmatized mental health conversations.

We then identified four pain points, or user needs our app needed to fulfill:

  1. Mental health stigma in Asian-American communities is often tied to the idea of “saving face”—or in this context avoiding potential embarrassment or loss of dignity/reputation from talking about mental health problems.

  2. Parents may have trouble understanding mental health language.

  3. Parents may take an independent, non-traditional approach instead of seeking mental health help.

  4. New tech has a big learning curve for parents.

Our solution

In order to resolve these pain points, we decided our app would have three different features:

  1. An accessible onboarding system.

  2. An anonymous live-chat system.

  3. Informative mental health articles.

With these three features decided, we then created task flows for each one:

Accessible onboarding system

Anonymous live-chat system

Informative mental health article (via daily push notifications)

Our prototype

Magnolia’s onboarding process

Our onboarding process is meant to be simple and accessible. In order to best cater to our audience, we wanted to give them the option of selecting what languages they spoke so that they could fully understand any content or chats they would be engaging with in the app. We also wanted to mitigate the fear of losing face, so we purposefully made identifying features such as the name optional. This is also why creating an account is also optional, because some people may want to access saved information while others may want a more anonymous experience.

Magnolia’s livechat process

For the anonymous live-chat option, we wanted it to be easily accessible for users, so it is one of the foremost prompts the user sees once they make it to the homepage. Once the prompt is clicked, there are further options for anonymity and also language tailoring to make sure the user is as comfortable as possible for the duration of the live-chat. Once they are finished tailoring the conversation, they are then directed to a mental health professional for their conversation.

Magnolia’s push notification process

Informative mental health articles can be accessed in one of two ways: either directly through going into the app and looking at the articles in the homepage, or getting an article in your notification system by signing up for push notifications. In order to make articles as understandable as possible, there is an option to translate the article into the user’s stated primary language, and they also have the option to save the article to read for later. This further helps the accessibility of these articles as an alternative way of understanding mental health language and the nature of traditional and non-traditional approaches to mental health help.

Project presentation

Key takeaways

This was my first designathon and my second ever design project. As such, this designathon gave me a lot of experience in aspects of the design process that until then I had only learned and applied on my class project.

A lot of credit goes to my teammates as well for my learning experience, as they were more experienced than I was and taught me a lot about how going through a structured design process can help streamline the prototyping of the final design. Since my teammates were not people I knew before the designathon, and the designathon was almost completely remote, communication was extremely important and I learned how to effectively communicate for the project in a remote context. Overall, we were very proud of our work and satisfied with what we managed to do in 2 days!