The Future of Self Therapy
Kind Mind is a mindset app. In a private, portable, practical way, individuals can analyze their thoughts to uncover how to act purposefully towards challenges.
Responsibilities
User Research
Conduct user studies to see how users interact with the design
Interaction Design
Mapped out user journey, user flow, features, and app controls
Visual Design
Developed color scheme, visual aides, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes.
UX Writing
Selected voice, tone, diction to align with brand values and user comprehension
Introduction
Acceptance and commitment therapy (A.C.T.) believes that it is entirely normal for people to experience negative emotions. Rather than squash, ignore, counter-argue, A.C.T. provides a practical framework for simply accepting and processesing negative emotions as part of the human experience.
Case Study Highlights
In this 10-minute video, you can view some key ideas found within this case study.
Focus Question:
How do we bridge the gap between
theory and application of A.C.T. ideas?
Key App Challenges
Despite reading about the amazing benefits of acceptance and commitment therapy,
there’s often a gap between learning and applying its principles to every day high stake
scenarios. There’s a need to take concepts out of the book and into the real world.
Education
Many of the concepts of acceptance and commitment therapy are unfamiliar
Exercises
The mental and physical exercises need to connect alleviating work challenges
Experience
It needs to be emotionally rewarding to want to use again and again.
Excitement
A sense of progress and community helps feel supported in the process
Objective
Kind Mind helps sort through thoughts, feelings, and actions to determine which ones are truly worth entertaining in order to make progress towards goals, despite feeling negative emotions. It lets you work out your mental health, without costly fees and ineffective coping mechanisms.
Solution Components
Education
Convey new approach to negative emotions The first challenge is that many people aren’t familiar with acceptance and commitment therapy. The app needs to teach A.C.T to users in bite size pieces while also showing a direct connection between their application of information towards the achievement of their aspirations. The app ought to clarify aspirations for impact.
Practice
Design mental activities to process emotions on the app The second challenge is deciding how to implement effective mental exercises in an interactive and engaging way so that individuals would see the benefit and want to continue to use it in their day to day lives. There’s a need to explore behavior options to clarify aspirations and match them with specific behaviors that help users.
Engagement
Make emotional health an asset for goal achievement The third challenge is implementing aspects of behavior design to keep individuals coming back, repeatedly, to get their emotional needs sorted out through the app. New behaviors should be tiny to start small. There need to be solid prompts. There needs to be a celebration of success of design ideal behaviors.
Hypothesis
The initial hypothesis is that if individuals have a portable
way to practice acceptance and commitment therapy for
their work challenges that it will empower them to pursue
their aspirations with greater focus and enthusiasm.
Mindset Research
Through interacting with users, I wanted to understand what mechanisms they were using to currently process their mindset. The goal was to understand what alternative solutions they’re familiar with and what their experiences have been to understand why these alternatives fall short of their expectations.
User Point of View
The self-help individual reads books on confidence but they don’t apply it to their lives because they put off the
actions that would boost confidence genuinely which perpetuates the comfort zone where their aspirations are delayed indefinitely.
I am
A female business owner who needs to
self-empower to reach business goals
because
Because I forget most of the A.C.T.
concepts taught in the book
trying to
I'm trying to practice ACT concepts after
reading "The Confidence Gap"
which makes me
stuck in unhelpful habits that get in
the way of realizing my goals
but
I am not applying the ideas to my
most stressful work challenges
I need
reminders to practice, hands on exercises, and recaps of key A.C.T. principles to live by my values
Primary Persona
Based on the interviews, I gained clarity on the main points people face when they try to use pop psychology principles to real world work challenges. The first persona is an entrepreneur, and the second persona is a therapist.
User Flow
Three paths were created to help users learn, practice, and
engage with acceptance and commitment therapy.
Sketches
Using Procreate app, I sketched out how some of the app pages could appear on an iOS device. In the early sketches, I envisioned what the onboarding screens could look like as they introduce app features. Later, I sketched out how educational content would be laid out in the resource library to show content categories. These sketches ultimately showed in broad strokes the layout of early app screens.
Wireframes
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Color Scheme
Kind Mind is relatable, compassionate, thoughtful, and practical. Through colors and fonts, I wanted to reinforce the idea of self-love through accepting good and bad is part of being human. Self love is empowerment.
Pink is associated with compassion and kindness, from a color psychology standpoint. The goal being to learn to how to ride the waves of emotions
and steer them effectively in a desired direction.
Gold is associated with illumination and wisdom. As users learn, they derive
unique insights that fuel their improvements. As they improve their behavior,
they gain wisdom into what drives their motivation and success.
Typography
The brand value of practical is throughly intertwined with the app typography selection. With a small file size and one font family it certainly lightened the load and upped download speed. The initial sizing for the typography follows a medium dynamic font size.
Headlines
For headline 1 through 3, I choose a font called Muli. It’s neat, crisp, and modern which makes it highly legible on mobile devices.
Paragraphs
To promote consistency and legibility, I choose Muli for the body text as well, which brought a natural harmony across all fonts.
User Testing
With initial designs in place, it was time to conduct user tests to identify usability issues and user preferences to maximize both effectiveness and enjoyability factor.
Tagline Validation
When the app is seen, users will inevitably see the tagline, and I wanted to test which tagline conveyed value the most and clearest fashion.
Tagline 1
Purposeful alignment for actionable progress
Tagline 2
Practical mindset advice for real world challenges
In a surprising landslide, 100% of the users commented that tagline 2 was the superior version given that it was casual, practical, clear, straightforward, simpler.
Icon Test
To further improve the navigation of the app, tests
were conducted to see which icon set made most
intuitive sense to users. In this navigation test, on
UserTesting.com, users were asked on which icon
they would click on in order to find group support.
In the illustrated icon version, it took 38 seconds.
The accuracy was 40% correct.
In the line icon version, it took 6 seconds.
The accuracy was 60% among users.
Clearly, the line icons were easier to understand,
with this user feedback the navigation improved
for the better.
Voice Dictation Test
Users want a variety of input methods for journal entries. Specifically, the option to use voice dictation was a highly desired feature to have for ease of inputing text. In this test, users were asked to identify which icon to click on to activate voice dictation.
With illustrated icons, left, it was accurately identified 80% of the time to start the microphone for voice dictation.
With line icons, right, users were 100% accurate on which icon to click on to initiate voice dictation.
Based on this user feedback, the iconography for input methods was created with a line icon style for clearer communication.
Design Preference Test
With the initial branding in mind, the design style was tested before a user group to see if the values and design direction were resonating with the target audience.
Through design preference tests, the users voted for their favorite color; it was a nail-biting neck to neck battle between battle between the three background colors of almond, pink, and white.
With a 3 way tie, I had to go back and retest to break the tie.
I asked another 25 users to chime in to break the tie. After all the votes were tallied, the winning variation for our demographics and user persona was the white background.
Diffusion
The first step in the diffusion process is to gain self-awareness of negative emotions. Through acknowledging those feelings, we can begin to untangle from the possessive grip it has wrapped around the heart and mind. Through this diffusion exercise, you can play your thought in a silly voice to laugh at it. Ironically, adding humor to a negative thought disrupts downward patterns.
Discomfort
With compassion for oneself, the acceptance of both good and bad emotions as part of the human experience brings peace as part of reality. This screen encourages improved cognitive clarity through oxygenation of the brain by using a breathing exercise that focuses on consistent slow breathing. The neuroscience explaining the connection between breathing and physiology is explained in a TED Talk.
Goals
Unrealistic goals, excessive goals, misaligned goals can all get in the way of making progress as perfectionism, procrastination, paralysis kick in when faced with a genuine challenge. This exercise encourages the person to think about breaking their goals into simpler, easier, doable chunks to make progress.
Values
Empowerment and self-actualization comes in part from living in alignment with core values. Each person gets to define what their top 10 values are to build the essential grit to make progress in pursuit of goals despite adversities, discomfort, and unforeseen obstacles. This keeps goals & values top of mind.
Community Support
In community forums, peers can share best practices for building healthy mindset in real world scenarios. The Q & A format is interactive and it allows the collective wisdom of the community to come through from the same foundation of acceptance and commitment therapy.
Inspiration
To help individuals live in alignment with values, it helps to have reminders so they don’t get lost in the hustle and bustle of normal life activities. In a random manner, little notes of appreciation are sent to the person to surprise, delight, and strengthen way of being in alignment with key values. In this screen, inspirational quotes appear and change each day, serving as key thought for the day.
Certainty
Users will get a sense of certainty by going through specific mental exercises to help them process their thoughts, feelings, and actions through a proven method established by acceptance and commitment therapy. This screen shows a progress report that the person can view in their private dashboard.
Appreciation
The app needs to give encouragement to the the user for making positive progress through praise, focusing on positives, even through thanking them for taking the time to make their mental and emotional health a priority. Individuals should feel that they matter.
Lessons
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Conclusion
Kindness when paired with practical actions truly empowers people to sort through negative emotions that fuel self-sabotage. When acting in alignment with values and realistic goals, people can make progress on goals in a way that allows them to surpass adversities. Life is finite; with decisive action is can be lived to the max. The comfort zone ought to be viewed as “The Stuck Zone”, “Never Getting Ahead Zone”, or “Potential Wasted Zone.” Through the practice of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) people create daring adventures that make for a memorable, fulfilling, life. The management of the mind, heart, and action is absolutely key to making progress towards worthwhile goals, and this framework truly bridges the gap between ACT theory and ACT practice to real world use. What I enjoyed personally with this process was connecting my love of reinventing how things are done and creating something that produces a meaningful impact in the lives of people. It’s a way of contributing to the greater good by helping people feel better towards themselves, towards others, and towards a kinder world.
Credit
I’d like to acknowledge the creators that helps create the icons and illustrations used in the Kind Mind App.
Illustrations by Freepik Storyset
Icons by Flat Icon