Empowering Mental Health in Underserved Communities
A responsive website for an Asian American family mental health toolkit
Role
UX Designer
5 stakeholders
Illustrator
Timeline
2024
Team
9 team members
Imagine a community for families to have an open dialogue around mental health.
The Breaking Silences in the Model Minority project is a nationwide effort to help Asian American families with their mental health. The project involves creating an educational toolkit on mental health topics. This toolkit will cover areas like understanding mental health, combating stigma, and encouraging reaching out for support when needed. More information about this project can be found here. As part of the project, I was one of two designers on the team working on the responsive website and the sole illustrator of the website’s graphics.
Goal: design a mental health resource website tailored to the learning methods and resource-seeking habits of Asian immigrant parents.
What kind of mental health resources are Asian immigrant parents looking for?
Currently, the mental health toolkit resides on an external platform that resembles an online course. For the intervention to reach its target audience, our team set to find out how parents seek out online information and what types of resources they engage with.
After interviewing 7 Asian parents, I broke down the scope of the challenge into three observations.
Sharing knowledge creates a sense of community.
The website must encourage users to share knowledge and experiences with each other.
Specific keywords are used to find resources.
The website must include resources that users are familiar with navigating.
Learning through articles, videos, and interactive trainings
The website must encourage users to share knowledge and experiences with each other.
An MVP to Support Family Mental Health Concerns
Find resources with keywords
Search on the Homepage or Resources page for articles, videos, or handouts containing keywords
Homepage includes different types of resources/media that users commonly use
“I Wish” Wall
Users can read submissions by parents and kids
Search allows users to find posts with similar experiences
Interactive forum for users to feel community and relatability
Cultivating Community Through Q&A
Users can interact with each other and share relatable experiences
Users can ask questions that will be answered by a mental health clinician
An Accessible, Family Friendly Design System
Impact on the Community
A family friendly and easy to navigate interface
Successful integration of educational toolkit to the website and mental health-informed resources
Interactive features to spark mental health conversations between parents and kids
