myndQuest

 Overview

When someone is diagnosed with cancer, their lives change in an instant. They’re immediately thrown into a spiral of appointments and treatments, living a life of uncertainty. While a cancer diagnosis, no matter how serious, has a tremendous effect on a person’s mental health, there are minimal tools in the market that provide patients with specific support and guidance as they navigate their treatment. myndQuest was developed to provide cancer patients with a resource to improve their mental health while undergoing treatment.

The tool has four clear goals. It:

Provides users with daily mood assessments (“mindset ratings”) to keep track of their mental health over time.
Provides users with mindfulness tools to help improve their emotional health and support them throughout their treatment.
Provides users with templates and prompted journaling exercises so they can reflect on their emotional health during treatment.
Tracks user’s daily progress and data that can be shared with the patient’s treatment team. While there are other mindfulness tools on the market today, none provide cancer patients with a holistic experience designed to both track and improve their emotional health.

Why myndQuest?

Cancer patients don’t have resources to build resilience and support emotional health that could potentially lead them to improved treatment outcomes.

This app is designed for use by patients at any stage, throughout their treatment lifecycle, and even post-treatment to proactively manage emotional health and collect data for lifelong prevention and treatment. In addition, the app can be used by oncology professionals to assess and collect data on patients in order to learn about emotional health as it correlates to treatment effectiveness.

Who’s Responsible?

From start to finish, I researched and designed this tool. I conducted a multitude of interviews with cancer patients to understand their unique needs when going through treatment. I also conducted usability studies to establish ease of use throughout the app experience. Finally, I designed all the app elements, from logos to branding to animations.

Here’s the Step-by-Step

Step one: Secondary Research

In order to understand the patient experience and how this tool could better assist these users, I researched how mindfulness and stress can impact someone going through cancer treatment. In fact, patients who accrue stress during and after treatment tend to fare worse than those who use mindfulness techniques to manage and mitigate stress.

In addition, I learned about the importance of doctor-patient communication. Most patients do not receive a lot of face time with their physicians, but when communication is increased patients tend to report better overall relationships with their physicians.

Finally, research suggested that mindfulness programming such as breathing and journal exercises may enhance sleep quality, reduce perceived stress, and improve resilience for those facing cancer. 1 Even more compelling, stress may influence the carcinogenic process in patients with existing cancer, meaning that cancer patients are at particular risk of further perpetuating their illness if they aren’t able to control stress and stress symptoms.2
1 oncnursingnews.com | 2 psycnet.apa.org

Step Two: Empathy/Information Gathering

I started by reviewing existing websites and apps that provided stress management techniques and tools, as well as programs offered exclusively to cancer patients. While the field of mindfulness has grown exponentially and there are a lot of tools meant to improve mindset, mood, and resilience, nothing has been created that fits the unique needs of cancer patients. These patients need tools and guidance, but also the ability to reflect on feelings and share progress with their oncology team.

In addition, I also interviewed several cancer patients to gather insight about their experiences as patients. Accordingly, I built an empathy map and persona. These unique individuals are faced with a lot of uncertainty while undergoing cancer treatment, and almost every patient I spoke to shared their desire to have some control over their outcomes. Mindset, and mindfulness exercises provide them with a simple task to complete each day. In addition, the ability to reflect on their treatment and see how far they have come proved to be a very important part of their journey. I knew I needed to design something that was both informative and functional.

Step Three: Affinity Mapping

I gathered a lot of information and common feelings from each interview. I broke the map into four groups that were consistent across the interviews: tools, patient wants, patient needs, and tangible resource ideas. I also identified several commonalities – all patients wanted a tool that provided how-to guidance for adding mindfulness activities throughout their day, and all patients wanted the ability to reflect on their progress over time.

Step Four: Empathy Mapping

Based on the combined user research, affinity mapping, and the data collection from the interviews, I asked questions to learn more about each person. The patients are atypical app users, meaning they deal with uncertainty and stress more than the average person. They also seek positivity in life to help them manage the pain of treatment. In addition, they’re information seekers, looking for control in as many areas of their life as possible.

Step Five: Persona Development

Based on my data collection so far, I created a persona that best embodied the potential user of myndQuest. My persona, Libby, prioritizes control, mental and physical stress, sleep and health management, and longs for a feeling of “normalcy”. She’s looking for constant positivity in her life, as well as consistent support.

Step Six: Problem Statement

Based on my research, I developed three key questions to help guide my ideation process.

Step Seven: Ideation & User Stories

During ideation, I started to draft answers to the How Might We questions. These handwritten brainstorms helped me think about how I could provide solutions for my questions. Accordingly, I created user stories. I was able to identify the key things I must include in the tool in order to provide care and support for users. The first was that patients should have control over something that may help them live healthier and longer. The second was that the patients needed a tool to help them reflect on their progress. The third was to provide tools and guidance to immediately improve mood and relieve stress.

Step Eight: Site Mapping

Based on the user needs, I created three main sections to house the most important tools and features for the user. The sections are: tasks, reflection, and emotional assessment. The emotional assessment is a quick daily check-in to assess the emotional state of the user. The reflection tool provides journaling templates and reflective exercises to track emotional state over time. The tasks section provides guided tools to help add calm and stress management to the user’s daily life.

Step Nine: User Flows

I also mapped out several user flows, including the one below that showcases how a user experiences a breathing exercise while using the tool. I also mapped the photo upload, prompted journaling exercise, and emotional assessment.

Step Ten: Sketching & Guerrilla Usability Testing

Based on the user flows, I created hand-drawn sketches to map out the experience on the tool.

I did the gorilla usability testing using the POP (Prototyping on Paper) app. I tested five users during this process. I discovered a few key insights that led me to make some big changes in the overall app and design. I:

Changed the progress pie chart to a bar chart using the consistency and standards principle.
Increased the clarity of activities. For example, I changed the tool that showed breathing to pace through seconds so users could have better guidance.
Updated the “data” section to be more comprehensive so users can understand where to access their information.

Step Eleven: Wireframing, Edge Cases, and Wireflows

I used Figma to create three red route wireframes. Shown below is the edge case for the prompted journal. First, I prioritized the tasks based on what was most important to Libby, then I added a character count so the user knew their limitations. The Wireflow showcases the breathing activity and direction when a user participates in and completes the activity.

Step Twelve: Style Guide

When creating and designing an environment for Libby, I kept the below words in mind. Then, I created the logo and images (a library of icons) within Illustrator in preparation to build the high-fidelity prototype.

Step Thirteen: High Fidelity with Animation and Usability Testing

I went through many iterations in the prototype and validation phase. I conducted two rounds of moderated usability tests on five users in each round. I built my prototype and animation using Figma.

Biggest success: test users knew what was clickable on every page and understood that three tasks needed to be completed.
Biggest fix: “My History” – users didn’t know what it was, and struggled on what to call it, where to find it, and what was included in it.

Conclusion

Through usability testing, I discovered that the most confusing or unclear sections needed three main principles and I applied them in the following sections.

Consistency and standards: Progression bar versus pie chart. Faded smaller text to click back on days instead of using a back button.
Recognition rather than recall: Instead of “hiding” the “My History” in a profile button, I made the feature within the app always available and clickable.
Match between system and the real world: When going back and forth about clarifying the breathing task, I made it a clock with notches for whatever count it needed.

Outside of these updates, I tried to keep things simple. This tool shouldn’t be confusing or feel like homework. Rather, it should be a safe, helpful, and even fun activity – something patients can control and do for themselves.

Case Study | Prototype | Presentations