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Mindnotes: Overcome hesitation to seek help
Place
Icarus Nova
India
Year
2020-21
Client
Microsoft Research
NIMHANS
Scope
Team-lead: Illustrations, content-architecture, Design Research, User Experience Strategy, User Interface and Design
An App designed to help people overcome their hesitation to seeking help. Meanwhile Mindnotes also helps users manage anxiety and depression by offering a variety of tools and resources, including self-help, self-discovery, and professional connect.
Design goal
The project was funded by Microsoft Research and the content partner was the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), India's leading institute for mental health.
With a rapidly growing pervasiveness of anxiety and depression among young-adults, a team of mental health professionals from the Department of Clinical Psychology and Centre for Public Health at NIMHANS in collaboration with Microsoft R&D wanted to motivate people to seek professional help by reducing barriers.
Therefore, we were tasked to translate a huge body of clinically tested exercises and activities to an engaging user-friendly App. The goal of the App was to help people with anxiety and depression overcome their barrier to seeking help.
Character design
Really early in our conversations with a client, it was decided to have a character that would tie-together the different modules planned for the Application. From a pencil doodles, I discovered th 'blob' and it gradually evolved to a more sophisticated creature with some character and emotion. However, it was integral to maintain a calm, cheerful and simple visual language to keep the App engaging and approachable.
Calm . Gender agnostic . Iconic
Versatile . Cheerful . Simple
Nearly 100 sketches were made of the Blob to cover a diversity of emotions and feelings spanning the 12 different modules & sub-modules within the App.
Content architecture & navigation
Coherent content clusters were created that organically connected and were relevant to the users' experience. Highly technical content was translated into more accessible and engaging components.
Using modular design framework to ease implementation for the engineering team.
Game-like concepts were used to encourage active learning and foster continued engagement. By staggering content across levels, providing repeatable interactions, and making it easy to return to content, gamified modules can help learners retain information and stay motivated on their journey to mastery.
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