Take 5 Steps to Wellbeing, on a phone.
Connect, be active, take notice, keep learning, give. Five steps turned into something a teenager can use on their phone after a Mood Matters session.
Take 5 Steps for Your Mental Wellbeing is a web app prototype for young people, built by Invisible Building with AWARE NI during the 2015–16 Techies in Residence programme. It turns the five simple steps to wellbeing into something a teenager can actually use on their phone after a Mood Matters session in school.
- For
- 14–18 year olds who have completed AWARE’s Mood Matters programme
- With
- AWARE NI, through Techies in Residence (Building Change Trust / CultureTECH)
- Built
- Autumn 2015 – February 2016
- Type
- Mobile-first web app: no app store, works on any phone
- Status
- Fully functioning prototype, delivered ready for user testing
Five simple steps
Northern Ireland’s version of the Five Ways to Wellbeing, adapted by the Belfast Strategic Partnership and promoted by the Public Health Agency.
-
Connect
With the people around you.
-
Be active
Walk, run, cycle, dance. Whatever you enjoy.
-
Take notice
Of the world around you and how you feel.
-
Keep learning
Try something new.
-
Give
Do something for someone else.
Take 5 is part of the Mood Matters course AWARE delivers in schools. The trouble is that a list of five things on a workbook page is easy to agree with and easy to forget. The app’s job was to make the steps stick.
What the app does
Four features, each one there to make the last one more likely to be used.
-
Check in with a picture, not a form
The first screen is an image-based mood board. A young person picks the image that matches how they feel rather than filling in a scale or a questionnaire. It is quicker, more honest, and a lot less like homework. Over time the board becomes a record they can look back on.
-
A coping dashboard built on the five steps
Every check-in leads to a suggestion, and every suggestion belongs to one of the five steps. Feeling flat? Here is one small “be active” thing. The dashboard tracks which steps a young person has been leaning on and which they have been avoiding. It is a gentle nudge, not a score.
-
Share it, or don’t
Borrowing from the anonymous-sharing apps teenagers were actually using in 2015, posts can be shared with others in the app without a name attached, or kept private. The point was to let young people see that other people feel the same way, without the pressure of a public profile.
-
Ask for support
The most important feature, and the simplest: a request-support button that connects the young person to AWARE. Everything else in the app is there to make it more likely that someone who needs to press that button does.
Decisions, and the trade-off we spent longest on.
Web app, not native
In 2016 a native app for a charity meant two codebases, two app-store reviews and a budget AWARE didn’t have. A mobile web app works on every phone, can be added to a home screen and can be updated in an afternoon.
Images first
Every screen was designed to work with as little reading as possible. Teenagers, phones, buses.
Post-moderation, with a human route
Shared posts appear immediately rather than waiting in a queue, because a queue kills the sense of a live community. But that only works if the request-support route to a real person is always one tap away. This was the trade-off we spent most time on, and the one that would need the most work before a public launch.
Built to extend Mood Matters, not replace it
The app assumes the young person has been through the course. It uses the same language, the same five steps and the same Five Areas thinking, so it feels like a continuation of the room rather than a new thing to learn.
A working prototype. And an honest ending.
The residency delivered a fully functioning prototype, presented to the Techies in Residence advisory group on 18 February 2016 and handed to AWARE ready for user testing with young people. AWARE described it as “a highly user-friendly and potentially marketable tool for young people”.
It remained a prototype. Turning a mental-health tool for under-18s into a public product needs safeguarding design, moderation, clinical review and long-term hosting. It also needs a funding round to pay for all of it. That is not a criticism of the residency model; it is what residencies are for. It is also why, when we went back into Techies in Residence with Barnardo’s and FixIT in 2021, we scoped for the day after launch from the start.
The story of the residency itself is on the AWARE Mood Matters page. If you are a charity with a programme you would like to put on a phone, start with our digital consultancy for charities.
Written at the time
Written along the way, as it happened. Nothing tidied up afterwards.
-
Take 5 Steps for Your Mental Wellbeing: What We Pitched at the Hive
The Techies in Residence pitch: a mobile web app for teenagers built on Take 5 Steps to Wellbeing, and what it would take to...
-
Digitising Mood Matters: From a Workbook to a Mood Board
Three months into the AWARE residency: why the Mood Matters app became an image-based mood board built on the five Take 5 steps.