Mental Reminder is an exploration of how developers can leverage good UI and UX decisions to better cater to those with mental health concerns. Over the course of one academic quarter, we designed and developed a reminders app with mental health in mind.
The majority of reminder applications on the market are incredibly productivity focused - this makes sense, as the majority of the market itself looking for those reminder applications probably have those interests in mind.
However, these productivity driven applications are always feature-heavy and UI dense. These large applications have a tendency to feel cramped and sterile, and for those who struggle from mental health concerns, this can further exacerbate user's anxiety.
We tried to create a reminder app that would appeal to those with general mental health concerns through a more welcoming UI and solid interaction paradigms. This will hopefully lessen the cognitive load and stress placed on users that find themselves overwhelmed with the current apps on the market that are too full of features.
This primarily focuses on SDG Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being. Because reminder apps have such a broad purpose and utilization (our app can be used to help users with anything from remembering to do homework to remembering to call friends/keep up with interpersonal relationships), there may be other SDG goals that we will inadvertently touch on, but goal 3 is the primary focus of our project.
This doesn't solve any immediate global issues, and it doesn't solve any immediate socioeconomic crisis, it's still an important issue to address.
An estimated 26% of Americans suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. A lot of the times, these mental illnesses can even overlap. Our research indicates that there are slight correlations on forgetfulness to mental health issues, and we've also determined through our systematic literature analysis that there are issues with a lot of the common applications on the market in terms of UI and UX when designing for mental health.
Our ICT solution might not immediately change any lives, but it still would make a significant impact on lives.
As mentioned above, our target users cover a broad range of individuals. From those that don't suffer from any mental health concerns to those with more than one, anyone can use a reminder app. The reminder app's target user base can be more specifically defined as those who find a need for a simple, straightforward, and friendly looking reminder app. Our feature set is specifically kept sparse as we found that there was a distinct lack on the market for an intentionally minimalistic application for reminding users of what needs to get done.
However, as a baseline metric, the CDC indicates that 1 in 9 adults age 45 or older report confusion or memory loss. More than half of people with memory loss also don't talk to a healthcare professional, which means an accessible and intuitive ICT solution might be extremely helpful. Additionally, if market size is anything to go off of, popular reminder apps reach anywhere from 10k to 100k ratings on the iOS app store. This indicates that there's existing demand and a large audience for people that needs apps like this for a variety of reasons.
Our solution is to have an application that gives us gentle reminders to care for ourselves. Not only to care for ourselves, but to remind us how far we've come with our mental health goals. This solution would ideally be a mobile based solution, as more people have immediate access to some sort of cellular device, and basic smartphones have been ubiquitous enough to acquire fairly cheaply. This application would also be accessible in the sense that it is entirely free, and we can reach as many people as possible.
Market analysis indicates two primary shortcomings for existing solutions - a lot of the apps aren't free, and a lot of them are too overwhelming to use.
Apps will try to fit everything into their feature set, and their UI will suffer accordingly. Users only have a certain amount of cognition that they can access, and by having more features, applications will inherently overwhelm the already shorter cognitive load that those with mental health concerns have. Additionally, a lot of these are subscription based or feature an overwhelming amount of ads that will hinder the core user flow.
By keeping our app easy to use as well as free, we can compensate for a lot of the existing shortcomings that our competitors suffer from.
We decided to utilize React Native, as it allows for cross platform compatibility. Additionally, the framework is fairly widespread, which means there's plenty of documentation and existing NPM packages to leverage when in doubt.