Mind Record

UX Student Case Study

MindRecord is a simple to use mental well-being tracking tool that allows employers to normalize, propagate and easily integrate mental health measurement across teams of all scales.

Why and Research

In response to an open ended brief I selected to focus on mental in the workplace as a

focus area given it's distinct rise in prevalence over the course of the Covid-19 Pandemic. I had been unsatisfied with my own firms inability to seemingly effectively support mental health welfare but substantial effort to ensure financial welfare.

Choosing my research method

To gain my insights as to how existing workers within Australia evaluated their workplace mental health support and how they themselves manage stress I chose to interview. I made this decision as mental health is a deeply personal experience for most people with complex motivations that would not be easily captured through other research methods.

I sourced my participants from past career contacts (3), friends (2) with the majority recruited from AirTasker and compensated $20 for approx 15-20 minutes of their time. I used Air Tasker as due to the sensitivity of the topic people I knew personally were less willing to share certain insights into how their mental health was impacted by their work environment.

Outcomes from research

93% of participant (12) thought mental well being is important for employees, however only 48% felt their employers gave adequate mental health support (inline with my initial secondary research).
No respondents tracked or actively managed their mental health through external tools such as mediation apps, journals or therapy.
46% of respondents found themselves being impacted by work stress several times a week, 15% found it impacted them daily.
50% found it difficult to discuss mental health issues with their manager.
85% stated lack of interaction with other as a key reason for not being more aware of other well being. Another key factor was lack of time.

Synthesising insights

After I had completed my interviews I performed affinity mapping across the responses and found strong correlations between social factors, time factors and system complexity as being critical, with sectors and company size being less important.

The most frequently referenced issues included:

Lack of easy support mechanisms (most were seen to be too complex)
Cultural norms at firms that did not foster mental well-being
Inability of difficulty in communicating mental well-being to others
Competing time demands

In short, people knew mental well being was important, but found ti difficult to talk about directly and were frequently time constrained from being more proactive. How could this be fixed?

Problem Statement: Employees and managers need a time-efficient interface that can avoid direct communication but still give a clearer visibility of mental wellbeing.

Interviews during research continually emphasised that many existing tools for helping manage employee mental health well-being were simply too complex and too time consuming to use. As such several functional goals were set:

Use a simple rating scale to record a mental well-being state.
Within 3 clicks be able to complete a Mind Record.
Within 4 clicks see a list of reports.
Implement an instant "Help" button to escalate those needing particular help.
No individual task taking more than 2-3 minutes to navigate.

Designing for simplicity.

User Flow

Design Iterations

Sketch

The basic goal of this interaction was to form the core necessary pages that would enable the basic function and initial testing of the product concept.

Questions sought: When tested, does the user feel like this is useful?

Test #1

Version A.

After initial concept was positively received I sought to address feedback concerning;

Date selection,
Improved navigation
Simplified record options
Sample report format

Ver. B

I focused on refining the UI and translating a sense of brand and prioritising ease of information display.

The "I want help feature was positively received however it was suggested that a more proactive notification element could be added so it was clear when that feature had been used by a staff member.

Version B Working Prototype

Improvement Roadmap