Take 5 Steps for Your Mental Wellbeing: What We Pitched at the Hive

A mobile web app for teenagers built on Take 5 Steps to Wellbeing, what AWARE made of it, and what it would take to launch.

Published on February 23, 2016

Last Thursday, 18 February, the six Techies in Residence pairs presented to the programme’s advisory group at the NOW Group’s Hive on the Grosvenor Road. AWARE and I went in with a working prototype on a phone, and came out with a name for it: Take 5 Steps for Your Mental Wellbeing.

How the idea changed

In January I described a mood board: pick an image for how you feel, get nudged towards one small thing to do. That is still the front door. What changed over the last few weeks is what sits behind it.

The five Take 5 steps (connect, be active, take notice, keep learning, give) turned out to be the structure the whole app wanted. Instead of a free-form board with suggestions bolted on, every check-in now leads to an action, and every action belongs to one of the five steps the young person already knows from Mood Matters. The working title became 5 Digital Steps to Mental Wellbeing, and the app grew a coping dashboard that quietly shows which steps you’ve been using and which you’ve been avoiding.

Public Health Agency page for Take 5 steps to wellbeing, showing the five steps poster: connect, be active, take notice, keep learning, give — Take 5 steps to wellbeing, from the Public Health Agency. The five steps every Mood Matters pupil already knows.

What we showed

Image-based check-in. No scale, no questionnaire. Pick the picture, move on.
Coping dashboard. Built on the five steps. A nudge, not a score.
Share or keep private. Anonymous sharing with others in the app, borrowed from the apps young people already use, with the safety conversations from January baked into how it works.
Request support. One tap to reach a real person at AWARE. The most important button in the app, and the reason everything else exists.

It is a mobile web app rather than a native one. That was a deliberate call: one codebase, no app-store gatekeeping, works on whatever phone a fifteen-year-old has, and AWARE can update it without a developer on retainer. In 2016 that matters for a charity budget.

Techies in Residence project page for Aware Defeat Depression: 5 Digital Steps to Mental Wellbeing, with David Shawe of Invisible Building — The project as it is listed on the Techies in Residence site: 5 Digital Steps to Mental Wellbeing.

What AWARE said

I’ll let their words stand: “a highly user-friendly and potentially marketable tool for young people”. After ten weeks of trying not to design something that felt like homework, I’ll take that.

What it would take to launch

I want to be honest about this because it is the part nobody talks about at pitch days. What we have is a fully functioning prototype, ready for user testing with young people. What we don’t have is a launched product, and the distance between the two is not small:

User testing with actual 14–18 year olds, through schools, with consent. Properly done.
Safeguarding and moderation design for anonymous sharing between minors, and clinical sign-off on the content.
Hosting, maintenance and someone at AWARE whose job it is.
Money for all of the above.

None of that is a criticism of the programme. Ten weeks was never going to get a mental-health product for under-18s to launch, and it wasn’t meant to. What the residency did was get AWARE from “what if” to something they can put in front of people and funders and say: this is it, this is what it costs, this is what it needs.

Thank you

To the AWARE team for trusting a one-person studio with a programme they have spent fifteen years building. To the Building Change Trust and CultureTECH for running the thing. And to the other five pairs. It was a good room to be in on Thursday.

If you are a funder, a school, or a charity working with young people’s mental health and you want to see the prototype, get in touch. We would like to take it further.

Update, 25 February: the Building Change Trust have published their round-up of the day, with where each of the six projects goes next.