Users find it challenging to prioritize their mental health as a priority due to their busy lives, financial constraints, and fear of judgment to seek the help and resources they need.

"How might we create a gamified mental health app that offers interactive activities to engage users and keep them motivated in their mental health journey?"

Gamification is a strategy that incorporates game design and mechanics into non-game contexts to enhance engagement and motivate specific behaviors.

Gamification is an interesting and engaging method that keeps user loyalty. It aligns with our goal of keeping users motivated in their mental health journey.

We used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to gather our insights. We conducted 5 one-on-one interviews to gain a deeper understanding of the barriers that exist, preventing individuals from seeking out help when needed, and sent out a survey to 59 participants who have or are currently experiencing mental health challenges.

Through our survey, we find that there are over 84% of participants don't have any mental health support or therapy. Additionally, all participants faced various barriers hindering their ability to seek professional help, with fear of judgment (over 40%) and limited time (over 50%)  cited as predominant concerns.

Further insights gleaned from one-on-one interviews underscored the pervasive sense of disconnect between individuals and mental health resources, with cost and time constraints emerging as key barriers exacerbating this gap. Moreover, the stigma surrounding mental illness compounded the challenges, leaving many feelings isolated and ill-equipped to address their emotional struggles.

Also, most of the respondents also stated that they do not have the habit of using any tools to monitor their mental health condition because they perceive them as unhelpful and may even have a counter productive effect. This is a potential issue that we need to address during the design process.

Based on our research findings, we created our user persona, Stressed-out Sam.

Sam is a marketing manager, he feels his mental health condition is getting worst because of his work stress. He used some apps to track and manage his mental health condition, but he found that it was unhelpful. So he tried to reach out to professional resources but failed because of time and cost constraints.

Now, he is looking for a tool that can record his mental health condition, understand his mental health condition, and provide advances for him to relax and improve his mental health well-being.

MindfulPlay was designed to engage users to keep track of their mental health condition and motivate them in their mental health journey to improve their mental health well-being. We have observed that many individuals facing mental health issues were challenging to sustain their motivation and commitment to traditional mental health treatments or self-help practices, due to time and cost constraints, and lack of emotional support. This is causing our individuals to ignore their mental health issues their mental health issue and hindering their progress in improving their mental health and well-being.

‍How might we create a gamified mental health app that offers simple and interactive activities, and community support to engage and motivate users to keep progress in their mental health journey? 

We used the "I like..., I wish..., What if..." method to brainstorm ideas for our design solutions.
Then, we do a dot voting to find out the ideas that are stunning and beneficial to users. Based on the vote result, we prioritize those ideas and generate the Feature Prioritization Matrix.
In this case study, we will first focus on the ideas that are high impact & low complexity, those are high impact & high complexity will be in second priorates.

There are two parts for the user flow, the daily check-in, and the challenge.  

To find out the pain point of the prototype, we conducted a usability test, here are the tasks we asked our practices to do

MindfulPlay seeks to tackle the barriers that prevent individuals from engaging with mindfulness practices consistently, normalize conversations around mental health, and provide an engaging solutions that enhances overall well-being and resilience.

Although it was a big challenge for us to develop the case study in a limited time. We had set up a timeline for our project, we worked very hard to catch up.  We’ve also emphasized research just because we are aware that mental health is a sensitive topic to tackle, as this is one of the biggest concerns that popped up from our user insights.

1. More thorough usability test of Hi-Fi Prototype
2. Have an Apple Watch version where you can access well-being exercises.
3. Have the app also sync with the Health app