Soluna
Designing a mental health app for at-risk youth in California
Project Overview
Duration
8 weeks
My Role
Interaction Design, Wireframing, Prototyping, Visual Design
Team
4 Interaction Designers, 1 Design Researcher, 1 Data Scientist
With youth mental health in crisis and barriers like stigma and high costs preventing many from seeking help, the State of California took action. Partnering with Kooth, a global leader in youth mental health solutions, and IDEO, Soluna was created— a digital platform co-created with young people to provide free, personalized support to 13-25 year-olds.
This platform combines behavioral health coaching, interactive tools, and localized resources to meet the needs of California youth.
The Challenge
As mental health challenges like depression, anxiety, and suicide rates continue to surge among young people in the U.S., access to affordable, stigma-free support remains out of reach for many.
The challenge for Soluna was to bridge the gap between its existing UK services and the unique needs of American youth. By adapting its offerings to the complex mental health landscape in the U.S., Soluna aimed to reduce stigma and meet the expectations of its partnership with the state of California, all while ensuring young people have meaningful access to early, effective mental health support.
Project Goals
Center youth voices and therapeutic impact
Meet DHCS requirements and tight deadlines
Position Soluna for long-term market success
My Contributions
I took on planning and designing a flow for discussion boards within the Community feature of the application, as previous research highlighted the importance of users having access to a supportive community. This research informed the creation and designs of the Discussion Board.
Plot Twist
As I onboarded onto the project, I familiarized myself with the research of the previous phases and focused on relationship building within my team.
However, I realized my current skillset was applicable, so I took leadership on the creation of the Discussion Board.
I took on the task of planning and designing a flow for discussion boards within the Community feature of the application.
2 weeks into the designs, the timeline shifted drastically – I now needed to make designs that could be developed by our engineering partners within 6 days.
The original idea had been, “this is a low stakes assignment as it’d be due in about 2 months time,” so other designers would be able to step in and support when the deadline was approaching. This didn’t quite go to plan.
Comparative Analysis
This phase of design was inspired by research done through co-designers and recruitment of research participants through dScout. Leveraging insights from previous research, I would conduct market research to inspire the layout and identify any opportunity areas.
I conducted a comparative analysis through popular discussion boards such as Reddit and Quora; These youth-centric platforms are some of the most used forums by our target audience. This included how forum posts look on a user’s feed vs. user’s profile vs. the posts themselves. I also drew inspiration from Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X (formerly known as Twitter) for commenting features.
I identified a key opportunity area to be versatility in commenting capabilities for users while reducing the clutter and lack of cohesion that is typically seen in Discussion Boards.
Screenshot of Reddit highlighting areas of improvement identified through comparative analysis.
Through comparative analysis, we gained more clarity about how other forum boards are structured, how certain apps handle the visual clutter and what users would be the most familiar with. Some clarifying questions that I brought to the team were:
Can users follow specific topics, people, etc?
Will users be able to organize posts by popularity or most recent?
Can users include images in their forum posts? What about links?
Prototyping
The Design Principles, synthesized from previous rounds of research, helped me keep users front and center throughout the design process and allowed me to advocate for design decisions.
One design principle I drew inspiration from in particular was ‘Play Forward’ for the tone of the designs. For this reason, I implemented elements including emoji reactions, as a way to make mental wellness feel a little more fun and approachable.
This was originally inspired by the emoji reactions on Slack; and the way to reduce digital clutter was inspired by organization of the emoji reactions on LinkedIn.
In addition to reactions, many discussion boards and forums included categorization of topics - so I used user mental models from my comparative analysis and implemented them through the design of category tags. This allows users to find content that is personalized for them.
I leveraged elements that had already been used in other parts of the app to assist with development feasibility.
Due to another feature of the application being designed and developed 6 days quicker than what was allotted to it, the deadline of the forums flow was moved up by 1 month; meaning I had less time than we’d thought and that I had to present designs to stakeholders and bring a designer into the middle of my process.
Now that the stakeholders now had eyes on the flows, new constraints were introduced. This included the hefty process of content moderation and a quick turnaround to submit designs to the development team. I also received feedback that the current designs were too robust to fit within the timeline that the development team had.
Iterate
In the short amount of time that we had, I decided to descope elements of the design that Product deemed as unfeasible and focus on what I believed would be most beneficial for users seeking mental health support.
This included a filter and sort option on the user feed to allow users to search for customized content & an option to disable interactions on users’ posts to simplify moderation process and assist in social media anxiety management for users.
Many design reviews later, the design became more and more simplified and elements were descoped to meet the deadline for launch.
I primarily focused on leveraging existing style guides to ensure design consistency and built on a design system as I was creating new elements.
Inspiration from AirBnb to filter through desired content.
Outcomes
My designs were approved for development, we met our deadlines for launch and the product went to market at the time that was planned. 🎉
Timeline and development constraints didn’t allow us to create some designs but, here are some features I did advocate for that ended up making it to the app:
A yellow interstitial “Pending” button to let users know that their content has been submitted but it has not yet been approved. This replaced the existing green “Submitted” button.
A static welcome forum post from the Soluna team that explains what this discussion board is and the guidelines for using it.
Here are some features I advocated for that got pushed for post-launch:
User flagging for posts instead of just Moderation Team flagging
Forum post categories to help users seek customized content
Emoji reactions instead of just likes
Interacting with forum replies
Filtering and sorting posts on user feed
Other Contributions
Beyond preparing the forums flow for launch, I also owned and/or assisted in the design of future features including the fast follow of Forums, Video Coaching and Goals.
Reflections
This being my first IDEO project as a fellow, I learned how to own my role as an interaction designer while providing assistance in other areas such as design research and client communications. Here are some things I’ve taken with me to future projects:
Show my designs early on so I can get the feedback that’s needed. I didn’t show my WIP because I initially had more time; Now I see there are many moving parts and to get ahead of my work while I can, to clear any potential obstacles.
A lot of stakeholders equals a lot of differing opinions. I worked with accessibility, product, development and more! In the future, I’d suggest alignment on the client side while ensuring alignment on the consulting side; That way, we can come together more efficiently.
I pulled straight from research when advocating for designs and not just intuition. Even if I know intuitively that this was a good decision, backing it with data makes for a stronger point to foster team alignment.
Don’t take it personally when designs are cut for the sake of feasibility or tight deadlines… or for anything at all. All I can do is advocate for my design decisions, for the users, and for what I believe in; But ultimately, the client makes the final call.