HOPES
Shaping a mental wellness app to support everyday self-care for lower-needs patients
HOPES is a mental wellness app originally developed for patients in psychiatric care, allowing clinicians to monitor recovery through features like mood tracking, journaling, and passive data collection (e.g. heart rate, phone activity).
This ongoing user research study explores whether a lighter, more consumer-driven version—one that reduces reliance on clinical oversight—could also support individuals managing everyday mental health challenges.
I played a key role in evaluating how this concept, HOPES Lite, was received by both clients and clinicians, and whether it could provide meaningful support in a more approachable and less invasive way.
My Role:
Led in-depth interviews with 11 clinicians and clients to uncover how HOPES could support real-world mental wellness beyond intensive care
Synthesised key insights into pain points, and opportunities across both user segments
Refined the product vision to position HOPES Lite as a more engagement-focused tool for lower-needs users
📍 Currently steering MVP scoping and success metrics, with a focus on retention and long-term engagement over downloads
Key Insights
Starting is the Hardest Part ✍🏼
Journaling is one of the core features of HOPES, yet many patients shared that starting from scratch—especially during low moods—felt overwhelming. While they valued journaling as a tool for reflection, staring at a blank page made it hard to begin. Clinicians echoed this, suggesting adding more creative ways to ease people into the process.
This revealed a key design need: for journaling to feel accessible, it needs to offer guidance—not just an empty space.
As a next step, I’d look into making the feature more supportive, by exploring guided prompts, mood-based suggestions, and themed entry styles. The goal is to help users ease into reflection more naturally, especially on days when it’s hardest to put things into words.
More data isn’t always better 📊
The current version of HOPES collects a wide range of passive data—from heart rate to tapping speed—and surfaces it through a separate clinician-facing web dashboard. Internally, stakeholders assumed that more data would lead to deeper clinical insight. But in practice, clinicians rarely use the dashboard—they simply don’t have time.
What they said they would find useful is much simpler: this quick snapshot of emotional patterns—and potentially other key signals like sleep—just enough to inform a session, without adding to their workload.
The screen shown is a mobile Mood Insights summary, designed primarily for the user’s own reflection, but also shareable in-session if they choose. It’s a small shift that reflects a larger one: data should be purposeful, not just plentiful.
Play can be powerful 🎮
As part of our concept testing, we introduced a quiz-style “Quest” designed to teach users how to spot common thinking traps (like catastrophizing or all-or-nothing thinking).
We initially saw it as a small experiment in gamification, but it quickly emerged as one of the most loved ideas in the prototype—by both clinicians and users. We hadn’t expected a learning tool to resonate so strongly.
This insight is shaping how we think about engagement: playful activities like this could serve as a fun and meaningful starting point to engage with HOPES.
So, is HOPES Lite really light?
HOPES Lite was initially framed as a scaled-down version of the original app — mainly because it didn’t require the same level of clinician monitoring (as shown in the clinician dashboard here).
But through user research, I realised that this framing doesn’t fully hold up. It’s not just about removing features or simplifying the interface. The shift in context — from high-needs users to lower-needs ones — fundamentally changes how the app needs to work.
In the original HOPES, passive data collection was the core. The app could function even if users never opened it — engagement was secondary.
But for HOPES Lite, that’s no longer the case. Without active use, the app delivers no value. This makes engagement the core challenge, not a secondary one.
This insight helped me reframe the direction:
If we want to support a broader user base, we need to treat this more like a consumer product — something people want to return to, not something they’re told to use.
What’s next?
The response to our early concepts was encouraging — users were open to using the app, and certain ideas, like the quiz-style “Quest,” stood out as especially engaging.
Based on these insights, my next steps are to:
Define the HOPES Lite MVP grounded in validated user needs
Prioritise features that showed strong potential to drive voluntary engagement
Align on success metrics focused on retention, not just data collection