Oneself is a social wellness platform that empowers you to seek help from a community of like-minded individuals, share your experiences, and learn from others. Our aim is to lower the barrier of access to engaging in a meaningful conversation before you have to seek acute care. As the Head of Design in a three person team, this experience was a crash-course in going though all parts of the creative process in a fast-paced environment. This project is currently in hiatus, with our app slated in the Apple App Store as a pre-order, while we figure out what the right launch strategy is for Oneself.
As someone who was new to the preventative mental health space, I first needed to soak in knowledge in order to be able to drive design work.
We compiled research from papers online and attended mental health related workshops and forums to get an overview of the problem space. We then used whiteboarding tools to identify and affinitize high-level research questions. I then turned these questions into a research interview guide, that we then used to drive interviews we had with domain experts.
One of the artifacts from the whiteboarding exercise we executed to compile open research questions.
I initially worked on logo and branding for the company. We had an internal workshop where we determined our brand values, mission & vision statements.
Oneself seeks to empower people to make the meaningful connection that inspires them to be their true selves.
Providing everyone the ability to create a safe space to connect, grow, and be their true selves.
The logo and color palette that I created.
As we hoped to get to market quickly, we sped up our design process in order to have the initial mockups complete before we hired full-stack developers to start building the app.
I then scoped out the initial experiences based on user stories the team had created. There were 7 experiences to build out: Onboarding, Profile, Matching, Chatting, Account settings, and Invitations. Throughout this design process we established strategies on authentication, maintaining anonymity, matching on prompts, pushing notifications, and safety against harassment.
These are some of the mockups that I designed
Creating a framework to develop prompts for users to match on
We then took these mockups and shared them with various domain experts and connections who have tackled mental health issues before. This led to several iterations on the designs and user stories.
A demo video for our Oneself app
In order to gain the most learnings from our MLP, we brainstormed what pieces we wanted to learn in each experience. We then mapped out the triggers that could be placed in the experience in order to get metrics on what we wanted to learn. After that, we worked with the developer we hired to implement those triggers in the code and connect them to Google analytics.
The list of metrics we compiled during a workshop
Once we finished developing our MVP, we performed internal testing using our React dev environments. We then submitted it to the Apple App Store and even more rigorous testing before we were accepted in. I worked on authoring the details on the Product Page, which includes the app description and the screenshots.
These are the screenshots I created for the Apple App Store Product Page
Oneself was accepted into the What If…? Ventures Accelerator program. This fellowship was designed to educate founders of Mental Health startups get better at building sustainable businesses. At the end of the 8-week program, we were given the opportunity to pitch our company to Venture Capitalists for potential investments. I took the lead in developing a narrative and building out the slide deck used for the 3-minute pitch presentation.
Our 3 minute pitch deck