Design product to improve mental health.

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Design product to improve mental health.

Asked at Meta (Facebook) over a year ago

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Amit J · Answer 1 · 2021-11-28T21:57:19+0000

Clarifying questions:

1) How do we define by Mental health? is it mental Stress, Physical health, lack of exercises etc

2) Do you want me to focus on any particular age group or user segment like HighSchool/College (Study Mental health), Work profesional (Work-life balance), Home- Maker or Retired people (Physcial health, loneliness etc)

3) By product, do you want me to focus on app specific for Meta, or Hardware products or other

For this exercise, Let me deep dive on Work professional who is the biggest segment of my user-base and provide solutions not only specifc to app but also hardware solutions.

In order to do so, lets first look at User journey of Work professional, respective pain points and impact to user.

User journey	Pain points	Impact to User
1) Wake up in the morning	Not enough sleep, lack of quality sleep, waking up with heavy mind	High – If morning is bright, day becomes easy
2) Get ready for work - Bath/breakfast	Hurrying up for Breakfast and sometimes skipping breakfast	Medium
3) Drive to work (N/A for people who are working from Home office)	Traffic, taking morning meetings in car	Low
4) Meetings/Office work/presentation for 8-9 hours	Back to back meetings, sometimes staying back	High – Back to back meetings, sometimes skipping lunch, lack of efficiency
5) Drive back to home (N/A for people who are working from Home office)	Traffic, taking late afternoon meetings	Low
6) Dinner/TV/Relax	Lack of family time, exercise (yoga/Gym), need to cook	Medium
7) Sleep	Late night meetings, sleeping/stressing on work	High – not enough quality time to sleep

Based on above, i would like to priortize #1, #4, #7 user journey step and recommend solutions

before that, lets connect the Meta mission to above problem statement:

Meta mission is "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together", hence my mission for above product will be to "use the power of community to help woek professional from Mental stress and make them more productive and efficient"

Below will be solutions i would like to recommend:

1) Wake up in the morning:

a) Build a hardware wearable product which provide feedback on quality of sleep and suggestions to improve it

b) suggest an event on facebook where user can exercise like yoga/Zumba etc for 15-30 mins online with experts and along with friends and extended community. This way user can be closer to its community and will trigger conversations on how other users are coping up with Mental stress.

2) Meetings/Office work/presentation for 8-9 hours

c) Create an app which triggers an event like exercise/Dancing/zumba/laughter etc in every 120 mins, make it mandatory for all employees and start at top of hour for 10 mins once during Lunch and once during 3pm. This will help in reducing mental stress

d) Create an app where employees can keep to-do list for a week which will have priority, timeline, number of hours required to finish the job, stkeholders etc. This ap will remind the user to start with respective task as per time assigned and help user switch to other tasks efficintly

e) start meetings 5-10 mins (for 30 mins and 60 mins resp) late. for ex: 30 mins will be reduced to 25 mins and 60 mins meeting will be reduced to 50 mins. This will help user to get time between back to back meetings, send notes for previous meetings and prepare for next meeting and use meeting time more efficiently.

3) Sleep

f) create an app which block user calendar between 6-8.30 for family time and no meeting after 10pm.

g) like a) use the event app to remind user to connect with family/friends on a regular basis based on when user connected with his/her network last to remain in touch with the community and ease out mental stress

h) like a) use event app to have meditation for 15 mins before sleep with experts and facebook friends and family online to improve quality of sleep.

based on above solution, i will prioritize it based on scale of low/medium/high on imporvement on mental stress and efforts to build.

Recommendation	Improvement on Mental Health	Efforts to build
a)	High	High
b)	High	Low
c)	Medium	Medium
d)	Medium	Low
e)	High	Low
f)	Medium	Low
g)	Medium	Medium
h)	High	Low

Based on above, i would focus on solution b) which is creating an event within user community to create routine for exercise/Yoga, e) start meetings late by 5-10 mins and h) creating en event withinuser community to meditate regularly before sleep

Below will be my success metrics for this product:

1) % signups for event for Exercise/meditation

2) number of meetings starting 5-10 late / total meetings

3) quarterly survey to check how they are doing on Mental health within workforce

si5PZCa · Answer 2 · 2021-11-12T12:36:49+0000

Question: Design product to improve mental health.

Inside one of the FB apps? Yes

Mental health – do we mean fight light depression and light mental health condition? Yes (this answer can really change the direction of the question..)

Specific local/platform? No

FB mission: provide tools to build communities and bring the world closer together.

Mental Health product mission: improve universal mental health status by building strong support networks

User segments:

1. General population who is suffering from diff levels of light mental health issues like depression, stress, loneliness. – largest, with the hardest pain, so also with the most urgency.

2. Family members of those who are dealing with it

3. Doctors / psychologists

4. Medical clinics – broad, not just for health issues

5. Pharma companies

Select a segment based on 1)size, 2)pain, 3) urgency for solution.

Pain points for this segment:

1. Do not know if they have a mental health issue

2. Ashamed people would know they are dealing with a mental health issue

3. Not sure how to treat the issue or if it is even possible to treat it.

4. If they decided to get help – who they should reach out to? How to locate a doc/clinic?

5. Cost of treatment – usually very expensive!

6. Maintaining the treatment (may be complicated to get to the clinic or time consuming)

What is the biggest pain that by solving it will bring the most value to the user? I think it is #4 (also aligns with the mission) but cannot ignore #2 and #5 that can really impact adoption .

Solutions:

1. Open anonymous groups for support – maybe by location/language.

a. Users automatically get an avatar instead of a picture + dummy name
b. Users can post questions and get answers from the community
c. Private message will be separate from their regular messages and also anonymous
d. Some groups will be opened by FB , some by the community (similar to FB groups but with the option to make it anonymous)

2. Develop a therapy platform with certified doctors in FB messenger.

a. Communication will be through text messages
b. Because it is not a “session” but an ongoing conversation users can pay much less for the support
c. Users will have the option to pay more for “help now” or live session through voice.
d. If we would like to make it totally free we can open it to the community and volunteers to be on the other side but that can be less professional

3. A different angle – improve people’s connections with their neighborhood to improve their mental health. By generally having more people to talk/relay on the mental health will improve.

a. Build a map that will allow you to self-report where you live, what are your hobbies, areas of interest, what can you do for the community, etc
b. FB will randomly match users with each other on a weekly basis for a conversation (or they can take it offline!)

To prioritize I would look at 1)mission, 2)value, 3)cost to develop:

1: Mission – high, value – medium-high, cost – low

2: Mission – high, value – high, cost – medium-high

3: mission – high, value – medium-high, cost – medium

I will go with #1

Thinking critically about my solution:

The suggested solution can be eventually used for use cases that are not mental health – and it can go to dark sides as well because when users are anonymous they allow themselves more (take more risks, say nasty things, etc)…We might need to limit it to FB managed groups for start and define clear rules to behavior in the group, as well as have enhanced monitoring.

Metrics:

This is a new feature so I would like to focus on adoption/activation.

1. New users per day (trying these anonymous groups)
1. a. Try = enter and scroll around. Do not need to engage
2. Activation – total users with first post/comment/reaction per day
3. DAU – number of returning users (not new)