Lotus You(th)
Combating Mental Health Stigma for Asian American Adolescents
Lotus You(th) is a platform by Engage You(th), dedicated to providing mental well-being to Asian American adolescents by providing lessons in psychoeducation, providing community support, and setting weekly goals.
I led the design and research strategies of the overall app and focused on the layout of the psychoeducation features. I utilized strategy frameworks, defined key actions, and shipped a polished design.
Engage You(th) works as a non-profit to empower Asian American adolescents by addressing generational expectations that hinder access to mental health resources. The goal is to design an educational platform allowing Asian American adolescents to easily access mental health resources and learn lifelong coping skills.
While there are many various mental health apps, none directly target a specific population. Similarly, it's often challenging for users to stay disciplined and consistent. Particularly as a nonprofit organization, focusing on user engagement and current interest is necessary for us to address the missions of the overall organization.
I collaborated with a small team to streamline navigation flow, create a culturally sensitive experience, and design an overall engaging learning experience to promote learning outcomes for Asian American adolescents. As a result, we generated 84% of user interest of the 25 participants we tested.
We first needed to define the goals we wanted to reach for our research, and listed viable examples.
Research methods
Target users
First, we needed to understand if psychoeducation ACTUALLY WORKS and HOW WELL it it works. The goal is to strategize intervention stategies based on proven research findings and exploit the benefits.
I interviewed 15 Asian Americans from various upbringings to understand how much our thoughts and experiences correlate and determine common biases.
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To understand the competitive landscape, we analyzed 9 competitor strengths and weaknesses to exploit the benefits in our business model and strategize innovative techniques in the market landscape.
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Insights
General Research Findings / Pain Points
I first brainstormed the necessary pages with the team and constructed the information architecture and user flow of the layout.
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Next, we created our initial wireframes for the MVP pages. Without these, our vision and efficacy of the app would be at risk.
The original design did not do a great job at visualizing progress so I continued iterating with the design team to emphasize numeric metrics, progress, and badges.
After rounds of iterations and improvements, I watched my thought processes transform through my mockups.
Positive Feedback
Negative Feedback
Therefore, we needed to exploit the most of user engagement times. Each lesson is composed of a ~3 minute informational video and a mini quiz. These lessons are kept short to prevent fatigue and a quiz right after seals in the information the user just learned.
As evident with research, *psychoeducation provides a comprehensive online resource center in both written and video format in knowledge about psychosis*
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Included gamification features, such as the “Planting Journey”, to increase engagement and goal orientation. Users can collect badges and view progress by watching their garden grow.
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Ordering tasks in order of importance implicitly drives users to click the first button since we want them to complete tasks BEFORE navigating the rest of the rest of the resources.
The Primacy Effect is a cognitive bias that results in a person remembering the first items in a sequence more effectively than those presented later.
Incorporating an emotional check-in after logging in each day helps users clearly identify their current emotions and emotional changes through app usage to show improvements in their mentality.
Journaling provides a private space for self-reflection, emotional processing, and clarity of thought, helping individuals track their progress and identify patterns over time.
Community support offers connection, encouragement, and shared experiences, fostering a sense of belonging and reminding individuals that they are not alone in their journey.
Together, they promote emotional well-being and personal growth.
We generated 84% user interest from the 25 participants we tested. The remaining 16% claimed that although they liked the concept, they had no interest in talking or learning about mental health.
For our first round of development, I was impressed with our outcome and feedback from potential users. Working in an early-stage startup was an eye-opening experience that taught me a lot about being lean and knowing when and where to focus my energy and efforts.
Given the resources that we were equipped with, we made large amounts of improvements and achieved significant milestones, though with additional resources, our potential for even greater innovation and progress would be amplified.
In the future, I plan to add a metrics page to help users visualize their progress on their mental health journey. This helps address the sense of stagnation that can often make the healing process feel unrewarding and discourage persistence.