AI-Powered Stress Management Product

• Introduction
• Problems
• Understanding the Users
• Designing the End-to-end Experience
• Mapping Out the Conceptual Model
• Designing the Interface
• Outcome

Introduction

Workplace stress is costing employers $300 billion a year (Business Insider). In the summer of 2020, I interned as a UX designer in Mindcurrent for around four months, to develop an industry-first B2B mobile app that reduces stress and improves performance of employees using AI technologies.

This project showcases part of my work where I collaborated with another UX designer, the leadership team and the data science team to design mobile screens that display visualization and insights about personal stress pattern.

Problems

Stress largely impacts employee performance at work, but companies often find it difficult to identify employee stress. It’s also hard for them to come up with effective solutions to reduce employee stress, because stress is personal.

Mindcurrent helps to record and visualize personal and teams' stress patterns, and suggests personalized bite-sized actions to help employees cope with stress.

Understanding the Users

I collaborated with the marketing team to define the specific types of people that we are designing for. I used personas to sort out different needs and concerns of our target customers and users.

CUSTOMER PERSONA

We came to the conclusion that managers with certain personalities are more likely to purchase our product. I summarized that in a persona to make sure that the design would meet the needs of our target customers.

USER PERSONA

Although we don't want to narrow down too much on the range of users, I still want to summarize their needs, hesitations, and some basic commonalities to make sure that my design would advocate for the users' experience and be adopted by the end users.

Designing the End-to-end Experience

CUSTOMER JOURNEY

I mapped out the end-to-end customer journey across multiple touchpoints to ensure a smooth and delightful experience for the customer.

USER FLOW

Designing the user flow was important to envision how the users are going to use the product that I design. Given that users may lack motivation to proactively record their status, I mainly designed for the use case when user receives notifications to use the app.

Mapping Out the Conceptual Model

To get a clearer picture on how the whole product works, I discussed with the management team and the data science team, then drew a conceptual model of the product.

Designing the Interface

Since the most important thing to a startup is speed and I was given high flexibility in terms of product design, I did high-fidelity prototypes directly to help the management team have a more direct view of the end product.

REDESIGNING THE CURRENT SCREEN

My first attempt was to redesign the "Trends" screen for stress patterns based on the existing design of the company.Since it's a new concept, I spent a lot of time understanding the product idea to make sure that I include all the details in my redesign. I use annotations to show some of the thought process behind my design.

FROM INSIGHTS TO ACTIONS

Considering that the app provides value to users by suggesting personalized actions for them to take to reduce their stress, the goal of this design iteration was to make users more likely to take the suggested actions after viewing their stress pattern and insights.

CLEARER CTA

We received feedback that people may be confused about what actions they should take on this screen, and the cognitive workload is too heavy for the users if they need to choose from multiple options. So the goal of this iteration was to focus users attention on a single action to get them started.

ENCOURAGING USER INPUT

Since this app provides personalized suggestions to users, user input is extremely important for the app to provide more accurate results. Therefore, another goal of this screen is to encourage users to record their stress level frequently. However, we also need to balance that with the values we provide to the users.

Outcome

Although the product was not launched during my internship, our design did play a role in helping to raise over $800k in the crowfunding round, acquire three beta enterprise customers, and attract some partnership oppotunities. I appreciate this opportunity for me to grow into a more versatile UX designer.

Thanks for reading!