Ripples

goals

Because of cultural stigma - where collectivist cultural values emphasize the maintenance of social harmony - Asian immigrants have trouble speaking up about their mental health issues, find it difficult to acknowledge them, and are reluctant to seek therapy.

My goal for this project was to make mental health support more accessible and approachable to Asian immigrant individuals.

qualitative research

‘Many Asian-Americans have tendencies to “hide up”, which means keeping mental illnesses hidden from the community and leading to a lack of treatment for the illness itself’

Rosenberg, 2018

To dive into my problem space, I conducted 5 semi-structured one on one interviews with Asian immigrants who have struggled with mental health.

I wanted to explore how cultural beliefs have affected Asian immigrant’s mental health belief systems, and identify factors that help Asian individuals break free of these beliefs. I found the following:

Lack of safe spaces

There’s a gap in the availability of safe-space communities that discuss Asian immigrant mental health, which perpetuates the hiding of mental health issues.

Help of exposure

Exposure to other Asian immigrant experiences prompts people to re-evaluate their own experiences, beliefs, and behaviours regarding mental health. People don’t realize their internalized behaviours until they learn about them from other resources.

Power of listening

Listening to other people, and knowing that other people are listening to you, helps people sort through their own mental health issues because an additional perspective is gained.

design pillar

I knew I wanted to design an app that would encourage Asian immigrants to speak up and acknowledge their mental health experiences.

The idea of having voice channels within a forum-like app appealed to me because during interviewing, participants emphasized this idea:

‘When you don't have anybody to talk to and pull you out of your headspace, it's really easy to fall back into stigmatized thinking because it's so engrained within you growing up.’

Charlie

By using familiar design patterns from popular social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, and Discord, I hope that this lowers the barrier for Asian immigrants to access a safe space that lets them learn from and share mental health experiences.

usability testing

After creating low fidelity wireframes, I conducted 2 rounds of usability testing (5 participants each round) where participants were interviewed and asked to do a think-aloud exercise.

Overall, users thought that navigating the app felt intuitive. They commented that the straightforwardness of the app helped support the idea of being able to easily connect with other Asian immigrants about mental health topics.

Usability feedback was geared towards adding user protection solutions, refining the interface’s clarity, and improving flow between screens.

Findings - interaction cost & learnability

Users expected that there would be a full screen view of active channel members after clicking join (instead of a minimized view as shown in Screen Flow Before 2)
Users didn’t think that they were was much value in the most minimized view of the (Screen Flow Before 4) voice channel display; the default view was unintrusive as it was
Users had trouble switching between the full screen/minimized views of the voice channel display (they kept pressing the up and down arrows instead of dragging)

Screen Flow Before - Joining Voice Channel

Solution

I changed the flow of joining voice channels and removed the most minimized voice channel view. Users now immediately see a full screen version of the joined voice channel after clicking join. This also increased the learnability of the drag interaction.

Screen Flow After - Joining Voice Channel

Findings + Solution - User protection

FINDING: Users found it concerning that there was no indication of how to report inappropriate behaviours in voice channels.

SOLUTION: I replaced the up and down buttons with ellipses (highlighted in blue below) to highlight the possibility of reporting users. This improvement was also made doable by the fixes I made for Findings - interaction cost + usability.

Before

After

branding

Mood board

To gather inspiration, I created a mood board. I wanted the app to convey a welcoming, safe, encouraging mood.

Colours

I then chose my brand colours. I wanted to focus on warmer, approachable tones that still felt calming.

Brand name

I wanted the brand name to represent what my app is trying to achieve: encourage Asian immigrants to break the silence on their mental health experiences. After brainstorming, I decided on the name...

Ripples

My hope is that when Asian immigrants see even just one person breaking the stigma by speaking up, other people will follow in succession (like the ripple effect) because this app is intended to act as a safe space and community for Asian immigrants to share/listen about mental health experiences.

Logo

I wanted the app logo to incorporate water ripples and a koi fish.Koi fish are known for representing courage, strength of character, and perseverance in adversity, which is why I decided on this particular fish to represent “breaking the silent surface of stigma”.

These final designs were picked because they resemble a semicolon, which is a symbol of solidarity between people dealing with mental health struggles.

Wordmark

App Logo

final designs

Finally, after establishing my visual identity, I created a high-fidelity prototype. The high-fidelity prototype aims to give off feelings of warmth, support, and hopefulness.

View Prototype

Overall, users commented that the straightforwardness of the app helped to support the idea of being able to easily connect with other Asian immigrants about mental health topics:

‘I really like the idea of there being a dedicated community that I can access at all times - through text or call. Even older adults could use it because the interface is easy to navigate. You don’t need to ask someone or contact someone to talk about it, which is the main point of this I think.’

Anne

reflections

As a passion project, my workflow lacked real-world constraints that I would’ve encountered in a company setting. But I enjoyed creating it as an I-wish-it-existed application, as this problem space is something that affects my closest friends and family.

Next steps

Eventually, I would want to implement additional features such as forum post tagging, content trigger warnings, and content moderators. These functionalities are important for maintaining a safe space.

Risk management + marketing

One of the concerns about this app was a lack of Asian immigrants that would share their experiences, which risks a lack of kickstarted discussion.

To mitigate this risk (while also acting as a marketing strategy), I would want to reach out to known figures in the Asian immigrant mental health community to ask them to share their experiences in voice channel discussions.