Therachat: Co-Design
Date
February-March 2017
Team
Sajid Reshamwala
Amanda Kennedy
Methods
Co-Design Activities
My Role
User Researcher, Co-Facilitator
The Opportunity
How do you create a supportive co-design session to understand people's mental models about their own anxiety?
At Addapp, our mental health product, Therachat, was also available for consumers to download without having to use it with a therapist. While we had already interviewed dozens of therapists, we needed to learn from more people who experienced anxiety.
Because their mental models for anxiety were especially important for us to understand, I decided that a co-design session would be the best method moving forward.
Process
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I recruited five people with anxiety and invited them to the Addapp office for an evening of activities that I had designed to help them think about their anxiety in various ways: How they relate to it, how they deal with it, and how they wish they could deal with it.
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I also had everyone rapidly ideate solutions that would help them to manage their anxiety, and we each used one of the ideas to develop our own Hero’s Journey: We are the heroes of our own anxiety journeys, so what weapon do we use to “battle” our anxiety? What is the treasure that we receive from that?
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All of the activities led to group discussion that helped us to dig deeper into anxiety and what it means to us.
A participant's drawing of what their anxiety looks like. The dots indicate areas of interest that participants voted on to discuss as a group.
The insights that I gathered from the co-design session informed our product roadmap by helping us reframe what anxiety means to our target users.
Impact
If you are interested in reading my reflections on the co-design session, I wrote a Medium piece that I hoped would help inform other UX practitioners preparing co-design sessions on sensitive subject matter: “Designing a Supportive Co-Design Session.”