By-Polar: Mental Health Virtual Sidekick for People with Bipolar Disorder
Role
Product Designer
Company/Institution/Clients
Scope
Timeline
Aug 2020 - Jan 2021
At a glance
Background
Mental health is a significant public health concern worldwide, including in Indonesia. In Indonesia, one of the most common mental disorders is bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder is a chronic or episodic mental illness that causes abnormal and often extreme changes in mood, energy, activity, concentration, or focus. People with bipolar disorder need lifelong treatment since the disorder does not resolve on its own. Raising awareness and providing support to those affected is crucial to improving their quality of life.
People with bipolar disorder usually use a mix of therapies, such as medication and talking to someone, to control their symptoms. To check on their condition, they need to periodically check in on how they are feeling and what they are doing on a daily basis. They also need someone to talk to who can understand them. But when they have big mood swings, it's hard to keep track of how they're doing. And it's hard to find a place where they can talk without feeling judged.
What are we going to do to solve this problem?
My team and I decided to help people with bipolar disorder in their therapy progress with an app called By-polar. Our goal is to optimize their therapy progress by digitizing the manual tracking process. By-polar serves as a virtual assistant that helps individuals become more organized by tracking their activities and mood. This app also acts as a caregiver, providing support to the individuals. Additionally, therapists can easily monitor their clients' situation by accessing recorded data from By-polar.
Curious about how to get there? Keep scrolling!
Deep dive into our problem
Desk Research
We’ve done research related to people with bipolar disorder in order to understand them better. We learn about bipolar disorder in basic, the symptoms, and how to cure it. This data will also be used to support research guidelines for in-depth interviews. So here's the summary.
Bipolar Disorder
Bipolar disorder is a chronic or episodic mental illness that causes unusual, fluctuating mood, energy, activity, and concentration changes. The symptoms of bipolar disorder fall into two categories: manic and depressive. Here's a comparison between the two moods:
How to treat Bipolar Disorder Symptoms
Treatment
Continued treatment in a certain period
Hospitalizations if they behave dangerously
Medications
They will get medications based on their symptoms with prescribed types and doses.Psychotherapy
Interpersonal and social rhythm therapy (IPSRT): focuses on stabilizing daily rhythms, such as sleeping, waking, and mealtimes.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT): identifying unhealthy, negative beliefs and behaviors and replacing them with healthy, positive ones.
Psychoeducation: Learning about bipolar disorder (psychoeducation) can help them and their loved ones understand the condition
Family-focused therapy: Family support and communication can help they stick with their treatment plan
Get to know our user with Usert Interview
After learning basic things related to bipolar disorder, we continued our research for deeper information by interviewing 5 People with bipolar disorder and 2 caregivers, people who support and are close with People with bipolar disorders. We conducted in-depth interviews (IDI) We conducted in-depth interviews via Google meet and Zoom for 20-30 minutes. Here are the respondent's profiles :
Gathering Problem
Following in-depth interviews with people with bipolar disorder, we aimed to gain a better understanding of their emotions and build empathy for their experiences. By analyzing the data gathered, we attempted to visualize how people with bipolar disorder feel and understand their actions better. We visualize our understanding by the empathy map below
To better understand and represent our potential users, people with bipolar disorder, we have created a persona based on our research findings. This persona helps us better understand and empathize with them as our target audience. This persona represents the common characteristics and needs of our target audience, allowing us to better understand and empathize with them.
We have Lintang as our Persona. To visualize how our persona deals with the manic and depressive phases, we created a user journey map. This user journey describes the common symptoms experienced by people with bipolar disorder during the manic and depressive mood phases. We create this journey based on a pattern that is common in bipolar patients, so there may be things that happen to bipolar sufferers that are not described in this user journey.
From journey and sharing about Lintang's experience while facing the mood phase, here is the trigger that she needs help
Goals and objectives
So with the problems that we've to find above, we will help them with By-polar to make their lives easier when dealing with the moon phase and maximize their therapy progress. To better align our vision, we define the goals and objectives of our current initiatives, covering:
The goals are clear and the possibilities are limitless! It's time to tackle these challenges with confidence.
Let's ignite the idea
Competitor Landscape: Mental health app that support a mental health issue
First thing first, to determine where we stand among other mental health apps in the market, we conducted a benchmarking analysis on four apps that offer general support to individuals with specific mental health issues. This allowed us to gain valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of these apps and identify areas where we can improve our own app. This exercise helps ensure that our app is tailored to meet the needs of individuals seeking mental health support.
Most of those app serves various mental health issues. Once we assessed all of our competitors, we charted out the features that aligned with our objectives. This helped us to discover new ways to design our app with the user's experience in mind and set ourselves apart from other competitors in the market.
Overall, while all of these apps include mood tracking and some level of personalized support or insights, their specific features and target audiences differ.
Daylio focuses on habit-building and emotional well-being
Woebot and Wysa provide chat-based support and mindfulness exercises
eMoods is designed specifically for bipolar disorder management.
Feature roadmap
In this project, we focused on how to support people with bipolar disorder to live more efficiently with By-polar. After all the research that we have, it's time to execute the idea. We have brainstormed features that are tailored to people with bipolar disorder and summarized them into a feature roadmap. This feature roadmap comes from issues that we find in research, user interview, and competitor benchmarking. Our aim is to create helpful features for individuals with bipolar disorder to enhance the effectiveness of their therapy.
Informations Architechture
We created an information architecture to understand the features of this application
From Idea to Reality: Our First Design Iterations
Wireframing
Wireframes are created to describe the basic structure and design of the app before designing the high-fidelity prototype.
Style Guide and Components
We did research related to colors that are suitable for the By-polar brand which is engaged in the Mental Health sector. So, we chose pastel color for the brand colors because it gives a calming effect. Then, we chose sans-serif font because it is casual, easy to read, and looks good even on lower-quality displays.
After that, we created the basic components needed in this application for creating a high-fidelity mockup. All components were created using Material Design guidelines and the icon we downloaded from the internet and modified it with By-polar color and style. The illustration was made by me with Procreate.
High-Level Concept from Main Feature Flow in Hi-fidelity design
Here are the main feature and interactions in this app. This prototype was developed in 2 iterations, where the first iteration was during GEMASTIK, and the second iteration was after GEMASTIK.
Virtual Emotional Support System ( Polar )
By-Polar is an app designed to help and support people with Bipolar Disorder. It acts as a caregiver and a friend for those who need someone to talk to. By-Polar listens to their concerns and helps them overcome depression. The app uses cognitive behavior and mindfulness therapy to help the user feel better.
Record your moods and activities
By-Polar is a tool that can record data about the mood, activity, and symptoms of people with Bipolar Disorder. This data can help psychologists and psychiatrists to understand their condition better and provide more appropriate treatment.
Received Personalized Insight
By-Polar uses data on user’s moods and daily activities to create graphs and insights about their condition. These visualizations can help the therapist evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment provided to them.
Record your therapy progress
By-Polar is a tool that allows People with Bipolar Disorder to track their therapy progress. With By-Polar, they can keep records of therapy sessions with their therapist and maintain a regular diary for cognitive therapy. This helps them to stay organized and track their progress over time.
👉🏻 Try our prototype to experience By-polar here
Validating Our Idea through Usability Test
To validate our prototype solutions, we conducted an online usability test using the Concurrent Think Aloud method with 3 people with bipolar disorder, chosen from our in-depth interview respondents.
Usability testing objective
Evaluate end-to-end main feature flow from interaction with Polar Assistant, recording mood, recording daily routines, recording therapy results, and viewing statistical analysis of the user's condition.
Here are some tasks that we've conducted and it completion rate from our respondents
After testing with users, we found insights for the next iteration. Here is our summary of the insights from this test.
Reflect
To maximize the quality and experience of this prototype, we’ve asked several experts to evaluate this prototype using Heuristic Evaluation.
Here’s the peer review from an expert in UI/UX industry :
Those peer reviews tried the prototype and then they evaluate it with 10 Heuristic Evaluations from Nielsen with Google Sheets that I’ve given before. So, here is the result :
There are some inconsistencies in naming, selecting components, and icons
In medicine reminders, it’s not possible to add medicine within a period of time resulting in repeated input required to repeat the reminder
Conversations between Polar and users are more interesting by adding interactions such as emoticons or stickers
So, this feedback will be improved in the next iterations.
Refining Design Solutions
In this phase, we will show the improvement from the testing and reflection phase before. We will show only significant changes here.
Homepage
Key Changes :
Added a CTA button for mood input and medication reminders
Changed the name of the menu "Daily Mood" to "Beranda", because the Daily mood does not match the various inputs provided on this page.
Onboarding at the start of the application to help speed up user understanding.
Medicine Tracker
Key Changes:
The dose and time input was changed to dose and amount of medicine per consumption, to equalize levels between input
Reminder time range can be selected within a certain time range by using a calendar picker
Adding input for taking medication conditions and medication reminders that can be filled in more than 1 time
Polar Assistant
Key Changes :
Change conversations on Polar to be more immersive and interactive with users. We try to depict conversations that explore the user's problems slowly and then reassure them if there is any indication of negative thoughts. This is in accordance with cognitive behavior techniques that are usually used by therapists but in simple forms and cases.
Journal
Key changes :
Included tooltips that display descriptions and overviews of features to improve user's understanding.
Changed the text field labeled “Pemikiran Negatif ( Negative thoughts )” to “Keluhan” because “Pemikiran Negatif” is too specific and the impression is to limit user complaints. Negative thoughts are one of the complaints that users have
👉🏻 Check out the interactive prototype version 2 here
Validate our design changes in usability text
To check if the solutions we made in the redesigned prototype worked better, we did another round of Online Usability Testing with the same people we asked before. We wanted to see if the changes we made to By-Polar improved its flow compared to the first prototype.
The success rate in this test is seen from the success of the respondent in completing the given task. So here are the insights from respondents :
Result
In summary, By-polar app can meet the needs of people with Bipolar Disorder. The usability tests we conducted proved that the respondents felt that the app was helpful because it was designed to cater to their specific needs. As a result, we can confirm that By-polar can serve as a virtual mental health companion for people with Bipolar Disorder. Moreover, the project was positively received by both the respondents and the Bipolar Indonesia community where our research was conducted.
Hard Work Paid Off, We Won in Gemastik XXI 2020
I really appreciate my teammate, Wanda and Dina, who has worked tirelessly to make this project a success and appreciate their dedication and hard work. We were able to achieve a big accomplishment just before beginning our thesis during the 7th semesters. We won a prestigious competition, GEMASTIK XII 2020, in the field of IT among Indonesian university students. The competition was held at Telkom University. Our team was the gold medal winner in the UX design competition category of GEMASTIK XII 2020.
What I learn
Looking back on the whole process, I feel like I learned a lot during it. This project gave me an understanding of how important mental health is for our daily lives and how we should be aware of it. I felt more empathy for people with mental illness, especially for people with bipolar disorder, because most of the cases happened in a toxic environment (but it's not the main cause).
Throughout the process of designing By-Polar, I have gained valuable experience in collaborating online for the first time. Due to the pandemic, I had to learn how to collaborate online effectively while designing this project. This experience taught me a lot about remote collaboration, communication, and time management. Even though it was challenging at times, it helped me develop my skills and give my maximum effort to the project. I'm proud of what our team accomplished and I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow through this experience.
