MoodBAT
About Project
MoodBAT is a mobile application designed to help users with mild to moderate depression by encouraging them to schedule activities and track their mood. To ensure validity, MoodBAT’s design is rooted in the foundational elements of Behavioral Activation Treatment (BAT), an evidence-based program with a proven track record. MoodBat also integrates mood-tracking as a major component of the process to help users identify and make connections between their activities and how they feel.
What is Value?
A value is an ideal, quality, or strong belief in a certain way of living. In other words, what is important to you about each of these life areas? What are you striving to be in each area? What are the qualities of that life area that are important to you? A value is something that is important to you and identifies with you on a very personal level. Be sure these values are not necessarily the values of other people in your life or society in general.
Design Question
How do you create a mobile app that incorporates the complex process of BAT while keeping users engaged?
Focus Group Test
Goal 1 : To determine common moods/emotions to include this application, we evaluate how color associated with moods.
Test 1: Our group noticed that the participants associated pale colors with more positive moods and darker colors with more negative moods. Specifically, dark red was overwhelming chosen as a negative color while colors like pink and white were viewed as positive.
Goal 2 : Our group do some activities to understand what participants value in their daily life and what kinds of activities they associate to those various values.
Test 2: Our group listed out what values are important to participants. Also, this test demonstrated how different people have different values and that the activities that fit within each value also differs. When designing our application, we will need to consider how to incorporate an easy way to enter activities under each value since providing a list of activities will not properly handle such a large number of options.
Persona
Negative
Secondary
Primary
Each persona shows a picture, name, representative quote, short biography, goals for the system, demographic data, technical background, and type of target user (primary, secondary, negative). All three personas are rooted in the results of our focus group findings to include life values, activities, common emotions and demographics.
FlowChart
Sketches, Wireframes, and High Fidelity Prototype
Home
Seven different buttons are included: "Schedule Activity", "Add Past Activity", "View Calendar", "Enter Mood", "View History". "Wombadges", and "Learn More". Users can navigate to other pages to track their moods with their activities.
Life Area
Although there are many different life areas depending on the individual, we chose ten life areas as default options based on research. These areas include: "Family", "Education", "Marriage", "Recreation", Parenting", Spirituality", "Friendships", Environment", "Career", "Health". We also considered the possibility of users creating their own life area, and so created the "Add New Life Area" option.
Activity
Users select activities they have previously participated in and track their moods accordingly.
Value
As stated before, a value is considered to be an ideal, quality, or strong belief in a certain way of living. Users are able to select or create values they believe to be personally important to them.
Schedule
MoodBAT has the function of scheduling activities. Once users save their schedule, the application will prompt them about how the activities were and encourage them to save their related moods.
Mood
MoodBAT has visually friendly emojis for users to enjoy.
History
Users are able to analyze their previous moods related to each life area, value, and activities in their history pages.
Usability Test
Usability Testing Goal
To evaluate the usefulness of MoodBAT:
Evaluating user’s understanding of the concept of MoodBAT during their first usage (e.g. What it is Behavioral Activation Therapy, what is expected to be done with MoodBAT, etc).
Evaluating the effectiveness of the MoodBAT (features, content, interaction and visual communication) in helping users complete their tasks and achieve their goals.
To receive feedback to improve the design of MoodBAT:
Discovering obstacles or any confusion that the user might encounter when using MoodBAT.
In-depth understanding of user motivation, mental model and expectations towards MoodBAT for future development.
Usability Testing Tasks
Task0: Making sure participants follow the tutorial and stop at the Home page screen.
Task1: Scheduling Training Runs for a Marathon
Context: Imagine that you’ve identified health as one of your most important values. In order to work on your health, you are training for a marathon. You want to schedule training sessions for a marathon you are planning on participating in on November 29th.
Task 2: Notification Flow
Context: Imagine you’ve run the marathon on November 29th as you planned. After your run, you get a notification from MoodBAT to record your mood.
Task 3: Checking Your History
Context: Imagine you’ve been using MoodBAT for more than a month now. One day, you wondered how you’ve been doing for the last week. You want to know your general mood and what activities you completed when you were particularly “excited”.
Task 4: Recording Your Past Activity and Mood
Context: Imagine you just had a nice dinner with your close friend downtown, and now you want to record today’s activity and how fun it was using MoodBAT.
User Testing Results- Analysis
Users reported:
Enjoying being able to track their moods and reflect on their history
The application was easy to use
Disliking the current color scheme of the home page
Enjoying the history pages, but would have liked a variety of forms for recording their history
Design Iteration
After analyzing data from usability testing, we redesigned the pages, following design specifications & usability testing results.
