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Safe from Harm App
Overview
As someone who has previously struggled with their mental health, and in particular with self-harm, I wanted to find a way to combine my user experience knowledge with the therapeutic skills I had learned during recovery. I wanted to create something which would be able to help myself and others manage and track their self harm urges, with an eventual goal of helping others to recover from self-harming.
Research
To ensure that my app would be relevant to a diverse population of users, I conducted an initial survey (using both quantitative and qualitative data) to understand potential users experiences with managing self harm, and to gauge whether people were open to the idea of managing their mental health through an app.
Participants were able to indicate their most useful self harm prevention strategies, revealing that distraction techniques and safer alternatives to self harm were most effective, which suggested that these should have the highest priority within the app.
Participants also noted that while they weren’t currently using an app to manage their self harm, that there was interest in this provision, and many were already using an app to manage general mental health, suggesting appetite for apps that can help with mental health issues.
Definition
I began by defining the problem users were facing.
“Individuals dealing with chronic self-harm struggle to manage their urges to engage in this behaviour, particularly at times when they are on their own, and are lacking resources to be able to support them through these compulsions”
From this problem statement I was able to create user stories to address the various issues these individuals were facing:
- “I want to be distracted from my self-harm urges”
- “I want safer alternatives to self-harm made available to me”
- “I want to be able to reach out to my support network”
- “I want to try new ways of managing my self-harm”
- “I want help getting through difficult feelings”
- “I want to be able to track my self harm”
- “I want to consider the reasons I want to recover”
This then led me to create a journey map, stepping through the features these stories generated.
Wireframing
With my journey map in hand, I moved onto mid-fidelity wireframing. This involved fleshing out the steps in the user journey and creating the content for the app.
From this I was able to prototype the wireframe in order to test out the user journey and ensure that the path through the app made sense.
Working at this fidelity allowed me to iterate through a number of different solutions for various parts of the app without having to spend much time redesigning.
Designs
Having made several changes to the wireframe based on my perception of the user flow, to a place where I felt happy that the journeys made sense, I moved onto the branding and user interface of the app.
I iterated through several colour palettes but eventually settled on one which I felt would be calming to users who would potentially be using the app while in distress. I opted for bold call to actions to encourage users journey through the app.
I also considered accessibility, and made sure that in the calendar section of the app, the log of self harm behaviours didn't rely solely on colour to indicate a relapse in behaviour. Instead I used a hexagon to indicate these days, which had the added benefit of not bestowing any judgement on the behaviour; whereas if I had used the red colour I had originally planned it could have made users feel I was judging their behaviour as bad (which is unhelpful to people in recovery).
Re-reviewing my designs in 2023, I felt some tweaks were needed to help the app feel clearer and more modern. I toned down the colour palette slightly, removed drop shadows and amended the border radiuses to be more subtle, which helped make the app feel less childish.
Usability Testing
In order to further test the efficacy of the app, I spoke to a small number of people (recruited through reddit) via video call, to allow them to test out the prototype and comment on the usability of the app.
Through this testing I discovered that participants were interested in finding out about resources that might be available such as helplines, in addition to the services provided by the app. There was also a feeling that it was hard to view services that were only accessible from the dashboard, such as logging self harm, and seeing reasons to recover.
As such, I removed ‘Settings’ from the main menu, and implemented an additional menu under a ‘menu’ icon in the main navigation bar. I then included resources, logging self harm, reasons to recover, and finally settings under this sub-menu, to improve the ease of navigation within the app.
In general the response to the app was positive, with users indicating that the app could be something which would be helpful to them.
