Med Pals App

Med Pals is a concept app that encourages you to take your mental health medication.

You can adopt a pet or plant, and watch it grow as you consistently take your meds. Or you can pair up with a friend, and give each other supportive reminders to take your meds.

This was developed for the Coursera UC San Diego Interaction Design Capstone Project.

I began my research by identifying a problem: that people often avoided or forgot to take their mental health medications. So, I interviewed 3 participants to learn about why that is.

I found that people were more likely to take their medication if a loved one reminded them, rather than an alarm. And one participant rewarded herself for remembering to take her medication by 'watering' a digital plant (shown to the right).

The motivations of either a loved one or something to care for informed the concept behind this app.

The main value of storyboards was to identify faulty design concepts before developing them.

For example, someone noted that it would be extremely difficult for a developer to make an app detect your footsteps. So, this helped me change the user experience to be more feasible.

My first usability test was with a paper prototype. This was helpful to generate ideas before prototyping. For example, the user suggested that the app should let you find new friends on it. This was added in later design stages.

With the first round of feedback in, I turned the app into a grayscale, low fidelity wireframe on Figma.

This was beneficial to focus on adding all the necessary features in the right place first. Then, after, I could make it aesthetically appealing.

I used coolors.co to develop a color scheme for the app. Soft oranges, blues, and greens were chosen because they're soothing colors for mental health care.

Credits to Vectorstock, FreePik, Linector, Taylor Smith, Darius Dan, PayPau & ultimatearm for creating the icons/backgrounds I added into this prototype.

After the first prototype, I organized remote, unmoderated user testing through usertesting.com.  Only people who answered yes to taking prescription mental health medication could enter the survey to ensure they'd match the intended audience.

Each set of users got a different version of the app to test which features worked better. Although the A/B differences did not affect their performance, users still made other suggestions for improvement.