© Lucas Wozniak 2024
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Mental health is often an overlooked element of user experience and presents unique design challenges and opportunities. I researched principles and practices that take into account common mental illness symptoms and how to alleviate or deescalate them through mindful design. My summarized findings can be found below.
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It’s in the word, but "wellbeing" is defined as the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy. I think one of the dominant defaults of design processes is assuming the healthiness of users, both physical and mental. The default design thinking often doesn’t start with considering one’s mental profile, whether that leans more toward wellbeing or mental illness.
And yet recent stats show the scale of this demographic, at least those with formal diagnoses:
When designing for mental health, there are both challenges and opportunities since this is a less acknowledged population, and mental health actually applies to us all, especially in the wake of Covid.
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Basic psychological needs are any needs essential to mental health and include:
Often with mental illness, especially serious mental illness, one or more of these needs are unmet, and this calls for a special sensitivity to serve these needs via design.
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Design for Tremors:
Minimize Cognitive Overload:
Choose Appropriate Language & Imagery:
Illustrate the abstract
Cultivate mindful attention
Provide non-evaluative feedback
Create a sense of community
A lot of these principles carry over to best practices for wellbeing-centered physical design, such as for workplaces:
Daylight
Air quality
Greenery
Acoustics
Density
Sensory
In conclusion, many of these principles also fall under user and human centered design, and this is actually a universal design approach. Integrating these principles into your design process allows users with mental illness to shine, stay engaged, and feel welcomed, while also providing benefits to mental health for all users/everyone.
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{{sect1}}
Mental health is often an overlooked element of user experience and presents unique design challenges and opportunities. I researched principles and practices that take into account common mental illness symptoms and how to alleviate or deescalate them through mindful design. My summarized findings can be found below.
{{sect2}}
It’s in the word, but "wellbeing" is defined as the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy. I think one of the dominant defaults of design processes is assuming the healthiness of users, both physical and mental. The default design thinking often doesn’t start with considering one’s mental profile, whether that leans more toward wellbeing or mental illness.
And yet recent stats show the scale of this demographic, at least those with formal diagnoses:
When designing for mental health, there are both challenges and opportunities since this is a less acknowledged population, and mental health actually applies to us all, especially in the wake of Covid.
{{sect3}}
Basic psychological needs are any needs essential to mental health and include:
Often with mental illness, especially serious mental illness, one or more of these needs are unmet, and this calls for a special sensitivity to serve these needs via design.
{{sect4}}
Design for Tremors:
Minimize Cognitive Overload:
Choose Appropriate Language & Imagery:
Illustrate the abstract
Cultivate mindful attention
Provide non-evaluative feedback
Create a sense of community
A lot of these principles carry over to best practices for wellbeing-centered physical design, such as for workplaces:
Daylight
Air quality
Greenery
Acoustics
Density
Sensory
In conclusion, many of these principles also fall under user and human centered design, and this is actually a universal design approach. Integrating these principles into your design process allows users with mental illness to shine, stay engaged, and feel welcomed, while also providing benefits to mental health for all users/everyone.
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