Lemonaid
Add a Feature
Lemonaid is a free app whose mission is to bring ultra low cost healthcare to everyone in US. They want to make primary care affordable and accessible to everyone, regardless of insurance. They combine their medical team with cutting edge technology to achieve this goal.
The Challenge
Analyze an already existing and highly adopted app and incorporate a new feature into the existing product. The feature will be based on an area of functionality to be explored and compared to user input.
The idea I came up with involved having a user who might suffer from anxiety or depression or any sort of mental wellness issue, before speaking to a healthcare professional, have the option to choose a meditation exercise.
I was fortunate enough to conduct 5 user interviews. The interview results were interesting, three of 5 the people I spoke to have meditated in the past and found it helpful. Their meditation exercises were self-guided. This was sort of inline with the survey results where the majority of users have practiced self-soothing techniques.
With that data I was able to create an empathy map where I really got into the head of a user who might struggle with depression or anxiety and need some sort of meditation to manage those issues. That lead to Nervous Noel. Noel’s a young professional with a high stress job and a high stress family. I’m sure at least some of you can relate.
The scenario I created for Noel involved him meeting a new co-worker and getting involuntarily anxious about it, this prompted him to do research on a therapist but he found that speaking directly to someone too stressful.
Problem Statement
Users sometime struggle to share their emotional problems with mental health professionals and may not know of other tools available to help them.
How Might We
How Might We get users to use the meditation app before speaking to a professional.
How Might We direct users on how to meditate properly.
How Might We provide meditation as an attractive alternative to counseling/medication.
Lo-Fi & Mid-Fi
The user flow was fairly straight forward, when the user clicks on the depression and anxiety section they’ll get a pop up that offers meditation as an option.
Hi-Fi Prototype
For the hi-fi prototype I tried to stay within the wheelhouse of their branding but chose a slightly more muted/pastel color palette to introduce a sense of calm. I’ll show you two of the meditation options.
Live Prototype
Learnings
While yes, I learned a lot about meditation, I mostly discovered a lot about myself.
Research has equal importance to design.
Organization is extremely helpful when working on a project by yourself (I learned this the hard way, I was up until 3am finishing this project the day it was due).
I am able to use both sides of my brain. I’m an artist with a lot of room to grow as a researcher and I’m ready for the opportunity to further develop that part of my skillset.