In our conversations we discovered that we all had a lot of common interests but one thing came up that resonated with each of us pretty deeply: we've all had past jobs that were incredibly taxing on our mental health and in which we felt a huge lack of concern or care from our employers regarding our mental health or well being.
Our approach utilized the design thinking methodology and began with a brainstorming session where we presented an important question which we could keep present throughout the process: "Why do we care about mental health?"
This is a passionate subject for each of us and one that we felt would be very impactful to address, thus the foundation of Harmonium was set and we had our direction.
A great tool we used during this early stage was an Affinity Diagram. This helped us to generate ideas and organize them into common categories so we could analyze and choose between them. Another benefit reaped by this tool was seeing that we really .
After deciding that our product would take us in the direction of a company that is focused on mental health of individuals in the workplace, we started our research plan. This would allow us explore how employees' mental wellbeing is affected by the workplace and would clarify what services and programs we could provide.
We conducted 5 qualitative interviews and coded the results to search for patterns and themes. We found several common patterns that included themes of tangible and intangible obstacles, lack of managerial support, personal deterrents, and a desire for workplace improvements.
Following our qualitative interviews we created a quantitative survey that remained open for four days and was promoted through social media. We also reached out to everyone we personally knew asking them to take it. In the end we received 86 responses.
The data showed that 98.8% of respondents agreed that there was an obvious stigma around mental health being openly discussed or addressed in the workplace, but believed that mental health is an important issue and would like to see resources and support.
The data showed that the true issue is the stigma surrounding mental health in the workplace, and without addressing that directly any application or training program we could develop would become just another drop in a large bucket. Our product is one of advocacy for the destigmatization and encouragement of mental wellbeing in the workplace. We can achieve this by providing a site that organizes and provides resources that help our advocacy and that make it easy for people to learn and seek help.
With our users in mind we began collecting images, fonts, and colors that each of us felt represented the way we felt Harmonium should feel. To our surprise, we all contributed images that consisted of round objects and archways, soft colors and rounded fonts.
Helping with consistency through our site are digital the assets I created in Figma. We wanted a character that could represent Harmonium as well as objects like plants, clouds, and pill shapes.
Using the golden ratio and the rule of thirds to create our wireframes, we layed out where our images, Call To Actions, and text would go.
Wireframes became our first high fidelity site mock-ups.
With our first round mock-ups built we felt confident that we had a good basis to start usability testing.
