This case study discusses Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and its symptoms. While I kept my explanation of OCD brief to focus on my design process, OCD is a complex mental illness that takes many forms. To learn more and gain additional context for this project, visit the International OCD Foundation.
If you don't check the lock on your front door 10 times before you go to bed, someone will break into your house in the middle of the night.
If you don't take a shower after every time you return home from an errand, your entire family will become sick.
You and I both know that the statements above are completely false. People with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) understand that, too. They understand that there is no correlation between compulsive actions (like checking the front door lock) and the obsessions (someone breaking into your house). But their emotional brains don’t always get the memo, and that’s where life can get challenging.
My personal experience with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, as well as my conversations with others who battle OCD every day, inspired this project. While there is no cure for OCD, I am blessed to say that I am able to manage my symptoms pretty well these days thanks to the amazing mental health resources out there. One of the most common forms of treatment for OCD is called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP):
The exposure component of ERP refers to practicing confronting the thoughts, images, objects, and situations that make you anxious and/or provoke your obsessions. The response prevention part of ERP refers to making a choice not to do a compulsive behavior once the anxiety or obsessions have been “triggered”...Over time, the treatment will “retrain your brain” to no longer see the object of the obsession as a threat.
ERP involves a lot of tracking, as it takes a while to "retrain your brain". Many people use paper and pen or a digital notes app to track their progress, but this can be difficult to remember amongst busy schedules.
This observation led me to design Embrace, a mobile app and responsive website designed to assist people with OCD as they manage their symptoms. A therapist can use the responsive website to send treatment exercises to their clients’ mobile app, or the client can use the app independently to guide their own treatment.
It is estimated that 1 in 100 adults and at least 1 in 200 children have OCD, but many cases go untreated because tracking treatment can be tedious. Many people with OCD do not have time for extensive exercises multiple times per day.
Design a mobile app and responsive website for individuals with OCD to track their treatment with as few clicks as possible, and use encouraging language to guide them through the most difficult parts of their treatment.
In addition to my personal experience with OCD, I conducted user interviews to gain a broader understanding of how different people track their treatment. OCD takes many forms, so it was important for me to keep an open mind and not let my own experiences lead to bias in my analysis of research findings. To ensure I spoke with a diverse group of potential users, I interviewed individuals from an online community of people from all over the United States who have OCD.
From these interviews, I discovered 3 user pain points:
From these findings, I created two user personas: one for Opal, a person being treated for OCD, and Dylan, a therapist who specializes in treating adults with OCD.
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"I'm almost never home, so I've always carried a small notebook to track my symptoms. If I were to use any other tool, it would need to be able to travel with me."
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"I specialize in treating OCD. My clients are dedicated to their recovery and I want them to continue living their lives while they're improving their mental health."
After completing initial user research and defining the problem, I started to ask questions such as:
From the digital wireframes, I connected the main user flow of completing and tracking a timed exposure exercise by creating a low-fidelity prototype. This helped me prepare for the first usability study for the mobile app.
At this point in the design process, I was ready to collect initial user feedback based on the low-fidelity prototype I created in Adobe XD. I conducted a usability study with 5 participants to observe how easy or difficult it was for users to complete the main flow, as well as learn how helpful this app would be for their OCD treatment.
From this usability study, I gathered 2 main insights, which guided me through the rest of the project as I focused on the writing and visual design of the app.
The high-fidelity prototype focused on the same user flow as the low-fidelity prototype. It includes iterations on the designs from usability study feedback.
With each iteration of this mobile app design, I kept simplicity top of mind per feedback from the usability study and my initial user research.
I removed the dedicated Daily Check In page and relocated elements to other screens to eliminate unnecessary clicks.
My initial research indicated that users would be most open to trying a mobile app to track their exposure exercises, as most people carry their phones with them at all times. Keeping in mind my goal of enabling users to track these exercises with as few clicks as possible, I decided to take this a step further and create some mockups for a smartwatch.
This was a fun challenge for me for two reasons: an OCD-specific tracking app for a smartwatch was something I wished for while I was in the thick of my own treatment, and I was eager to explore designing for this small screen size. As you can see, simplicity is crucial for smartwatch interfaces as described in Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for watchOS.
OCD treatment is a little counterintuitive. Instead of seeking calmness and reassurance, ERP involves sitting with uncertainty and disturbing thoughts without trying to eliminate them through compulsions. Sounds terrible, right? Yes. Yes it is.
Because of this, I wanted to be especially intentional about the language in this app. I wanted the user to feel like they were talking to a therapist when they use the app. I wanted to help users acknowledge that this work takes courage and discipline, and that they have already succeeded simply by showing up.
Take the Exercise Instructions screen for example. After determining how this screen fit into the overall user flow, I evaluated the language that was presented to users:
At the beginning of this project, I had planned on creating both the mobile app and the responsive website for the same group of users: adults who are completing treatment for their OCD. However, as I began creating the responsive website, I revisited my initial user research and realized that the most common use case for the website would be a therapist updating exposure exercises for their clients, instead of the client tracking their exercises. With that in mind, I decided to focus on the therapist user persona while creating a sitemap.
"I specialize in treating OCD. My clients are dedicated to their recovery and I want them to continue living their lives while they're improving their mental health."
While designing the Embrace mobile app and responsive website, I kept the following points in mind to make Embrace as accessible as possible:
Users shared that they would be open and excited about the possibility of using a mobile app to track their OCD treatment as they live their daily lives. Therapists appreciate having one centralized place to assign and track all of their clients’ exercises.
In doing this user research, I had the opportunity to practice keeping my own bias in check. As someone who is very familiar with OCD treatment, I reminded myself to consider what others would find useful in an app and website, in addition to what I personally would find useful.
I also learned that a good user experience doesn’t need to be overly intricate. While complex visual design certainly makes products a joy to use, sometimes the simplest designs are the most effective.
I gained valuable knowledge and experience from this project, and throughout the process I couldn't help but brainstorm potential next steps to improve Embrace even further:
© 2023 Katelen Dusek
