While struggling with mental health might feel isolating, you are not alone.
Empowering users with the tools to help themselves became a crucial mission for Buoy because feeling adrift and alone is paralyzing. When users have agency and confidence, that's when real improvements to mental health can occur.
Designing Buoy to address the differing needs of users began with competitor analysis, as well as surveys and interviews with potential users in the target demographic.
Personas were crucial in identifying and illustrating Buoy's key users and what those specific user journeys would look like:
From there task flows were created to guide the design of initial wireframes:
Subsequent usability and preference tests were used to make adjustments to the design. Design successes (such as the grid style layout, and the very optional account creation which let users experience some of the product without pressuring sign up) were confirmed, while pain points (difficult text readability, and the confusion between AI chat versus on boarding and therapist-matching questionnaires) were revealed.
Rainbow Spreadsheet of usability test results:
Examples of edits made in response to test data:
After modifying the user flow and increasing fidelity ten peer reviews of the prototype revealed more stylistic and feature issues to resolve:
Experience the prototype:
