Digitising Mood Matters: From a Workbook to a Mood Board

Three months into the AWARE residency: why the app became an anonymous, image-based mood board built on the five Take 5 steps.

Published on January 12, 2016

The Building Change Trust published a short case study on our project with AWARE last week, and an interview with me a couple of days later, so it seems like a good time to write down where the Mood Matters project has got to in my own words. (If you missed it, here’s where it started.)

Building Change Trust case study on AWARE and the Mood Matters problem, Techies in Residence, 5 January 2016 — The Building Change Trust’s case study on AWARE, published 5 January.

The problem we chose

When I wrote in September I said the question was what happens after a Mood Matters session ends. Three months in, that’s still the question, but it has got a lot sharper.

Mood Matters gives a young person a way of understanding how they feel and five practical steps to do something about it. What it can’t do, in ninety minutes, is be there on the Tuesday night three weeks later when they actually need it. Nor can AWARE: they have a small team and every school in Northern Ireland to get round.

So the thing we’re building has to do two jobs. It has to keep the programme alive on the young person’s phone, and it has to make it more likely that someone who needs help asks for it.

Where the idea came from

Two things collided during the design-thinking work at CultureTECH.

The first was Whisper. If you have a teenager in your life you’ll know it: the app where you post how you feel, anonymously, over a picture. What struck me wasn’t the app itself but how honest people are on it. Take the name away and the guard comes down.

The second was AWARE’s own DOT (Do One Thing) campaign, which asks people to commit to one small action for their mental health. Not a programme, not a plan. One thing.

Put those together and you get the concept we’re prototyping: an interactive mood board. A young person who has been through Mood Matters picks an image that matches how they feel (no forms, no scales), and the app nudges them towards one small thing to do about it, drawn from the five Take 5 steps they already learned in class. They can keep it private or share it, without a name, with others in the app. And there is always a button that goes to a real person at AWARE.

What I’ve learned about building for a charity

The programme is the product. My instinct in September was to design something new. The right answer was to design something that feels like a continuation of the room: same language, same five steps. Every time I drifted from that, the AWARE team pulled me back, and they were right.

Working remotely works, with discipline. AWARE are split between Belfast and Derry, so most of the residency has been calls and shared documents, with regular sessions in person. It has been fine, because the process is fixed: understand, ideate, narrow, prototype, test, repeat.

The hard conversations are about safety, not features. Anonymous sharing between under-18s about their mental health is not something you add lightly. We have spent more time on what happens when someone posts something worrying than on any screen in the app, and I expect that to continue.

Building Change Trust interview: Meet the Techies, David Shawe of Invisible Building, 7 January 2016 — From the Trust’s Meet the Techies series, 7 January.

What’s next

We pitch to the programme’s advisory group in February. Between now and then: a working prototype on a phone, tested with the AWARE team, and a clear view of what it would take to put it in front of actual young people. I’ll write it up after the pitch.