CHI Design Competition: A Mobile Support Platform for Depression Patients

Leveling the Playing Field

"Leveling the Playing Field" was the theme of 2017 CHI Student Design Competition. This reminded my teammates and I of our friends suffering from depression. Due to a strong stigma against mental illness, lots of them didn't know who to talk to but were afraid of going to psychotherapy.

Discover and Define

Interviews

We first interviewed 12 individuals from Taiwan and China, including 3 therapists and 9 individuals who have sought help for possible depression. From these interviews we discovered that college students, especially, did not have their close family or friends nearby, which resulted in a low possibility of expressing their feelings with a trusted person, so we decided to narrow down the target group to college students in Taiwan and China.

We later interviewed three Americans in order to comprehend deeply about how culture affects the way depression patients facing their illness. We found they were more open to sharing about depression and more able to access various supportive resources.

Findings

From the interviews, we concluded seven findings and categorized them into 4 needs as follows:

> I have the fear for the unknown future such as whether or when I will recover,what I will be like after suffering from depression,

> I don’t want to be the object of sympathy or isolated,

> I have limited information about depression,

> I need others’ opinions to judge whether I’m good or bad because I lack self-confidence.

Problem Statement

For an 18-22 year old college student from Taiwan or China who is suffering from depression, he or she needs a way to feel supported by others because it is important to be empowered to live fully with depression.

Brainstorming

Wearable Device + Chatting Platform

After exploring various media, we tried to combine a wearable device with a mobile app. One of our ideas is a one-on-one chatting platform that a user can simply press the button on the wearable device, and the system will match a "listener" automatically to the user, since we have identified that depression patients want to talk to others when they feel bad, and they would like to support others when they feel better. On this platform, a user thus can switch identities between someone who wants to get support from the community or who wants to show support.

Weather Metaphor

The other idea is an app that anonymously shows mood conditions of people around the user. We use “weather” as a metaphor to describe people’s mood. For example, sunny day represents a good mood, and thunderstorm represents a very bad condition. Users can not only express their mood, but also give tools to others, such as an umbrella or gloves according to their “mood”, to support them by showing they are not alone. We aim to help users know that although it is impossible to change the weather, we can always figure out a way together to live with it.

Final Design: UMooD

UMooD is a one-on-one support platform for depressed college students in Taiwan or China to quickly find an individual who has battled with depression to talk to. Feel free to play with our InVision prototype.

Enjoy our product video above!

Anonymity

When a user is suffering from the negative emotion but afraid of reaching out to friends or family, he or she can come to UMooD anonymously as “the rain” to find “an umbrella”, which is a person who has also suffered from depression, to express his or her feelings.

Rain and Umbrella Metaphors

We would like to convey the message to depressed people that negative emotion is not their fault but just the symptoms of this illness. Therefore, they are strongly encouraged to search for help to better get along with this illness instead of blaming themselves or trying to stop the rumination by themselves. This concept is like people always find an umbrella first in rainy days instead of trying to stop the rain.

Match with Someone Alike

The system will first match an umbrella to the rain based on their profile information, including their illness type, therapy and medicine history, and their personal interests or hobbies.

Together Makes it Better

As a conversation gets going, the background of the conversation will change gradually from rain to sunshine according to the user’s emotion detected from the text analysis. After the conversation, the user can rate his or her current feelings with a weather representation. The system will optimize the match between rain and umbrella based on the feedback.

Chat-History Review

In addition, all the conversations are saved for users to review, since we found in our interviews that writing and reading past records can help them organize their thoughts.

Reflection

Even though we didn't make it to the second round of the competition, I learned a lot these 3 months.

Empathy

It is a special and precious experience to empathize and understand our target population: depression patients. Our team sent out lots of requests to mental health organizations and visited doctors in a cold and snowy day. Of course, we received lots of rejections, but this made us be more grateful to those who were willing to share with us. In addition, it's my first time to talk to friends who suffer from this illness about their feelings and stories. I learned to pay more attention to how I phrased in interviews. The more I knew about their difficulties and this illness, the more desperate I was to come up with an effective solution to help them.

Competitive Analysis is Important

In terms of design, we didn't do a very thorough competitive analysis in the early stage of our project. When there was only one month left, we found an existing service very similar to our idea. It was like a huge bomb, but we were not able to make too much change at that stage. From this experience, I realized the importance of exploring competitive products early in the process, so we can avoid to repeat what others have done.

After this project, I am more determined to take UX designer as my career, since there is an innate drive in me to empathize with people and get a problem solved. I enjoy challenges and can't wait to get my hands dirty!