Mellowdy

Project Overview

This project was part of an intensive 48-hour HealthTech Hackathon hosted by TH.0. My team and I won 2nd place for the app we created to support adolescent mental health and wellbeing through music therapy.

The Challenge

Our challenge was to develop a digital solution incorporating music to help individuals struggling with mental health.

Info

My Role: UX Designer, UX Researcher 

Timeline: 48 hours (June 2022)

Team: Yves Flores (UX/UI Designer), Shruti Kharadi (Digital Strategist), Brian Nguyen (Developer), Nida Zohra (Developer), Myself (UX Designer)

Tools: Figma, Canva, Zeplin

Results: 2nd place win against 8 other teams.

The Solution

We created Mellowdy, an app designed for adolescents struggling with anxiety and depression. The app incorporates music therapy and routine-building to help young adults create better habits and improve their mental well-being.

With Mellowdy, adolescents can make curated therapeutic music a part of their personalized self-care routine.

Design Process

Setting the Ground Rules

Our team consisted of 2 UX Designers, 2 Developers and 1 Digital Strategist. In our first meeting, we set a few ground rules to help us stay organized and facilitate remote collaboration.

Here’s what we did to stay productive throughout the 48 hours: 

Understanding the Problem

Young people are the biggest demographic currently struggling with mental illness. The consequences of failing to address adolescent mental illness extend to adulthood.

With this information, we decided to take a preventative approach with our final solution and narrow our target users to adolescents.

Proto-Persona: Understanding Our Users

Now it was time to think about who we were designing for. Drawing from the research data, we created a proto-persona to help us stay aligned with a user-centered design approach.

Brainstorming

Once we had a clear idea of who we were designing for, we had a collaborative brainstorming session to share ideas and suggest product features for our solution. We agreed our solution should include the following:

Task Flow: Defining Product Functionality

After narrowing down ideas for our solution, we created a task flow to outline steps users would need to take to create personalized daily routines with curated, therapeutic playlists.

While creating the task flow diagram, we consulted closely with the developers to ensure feasibility and functionality requirements within the strict time constraints.

Sketching + Wireframing: Building The Experience

Then came time to put our ideas on paper. Yves (the other designer) quickly drew up a few exploratory sketches based on our chosen task flow, and I translated those designs into lo-fi wireframes.

UI Kit

Hi-Fi Prototype

After handing over the hi-fi prototype to the developers, we worked alongside them to assist them with executing our designs.

In the end, we created Mellowdy, a mobile app to help adolescents better manage symptoms of anxiety and depression by pairing their daily routine with the therapeutic power of music. Mellowdy provides an accessible and engaging way to tackle adolescent mental health and well-being.

Prepare Pitch + Present

Presentation

Finally, it was time to present our hard work to a panel of judges and competing teams. Using the script we prepared the night before, we needed to:

• Give a brief overview of our challenge statement

• Showcase our design process

• Do a walkthrough of our interactive prototype

• Sell our proposed solution

I presented our solution to a panel of judges and received positive feedback. My team and I were awarded 2nd place against 8 other teams!

Key Learnings

Final Thoughts & Retrospective

Let’s Connect

Get in touch for opportunities or just to say hi!