7 Cups
7 Cups is a free online community to find and give peer emotional support as well as paid licensed therapy subscriptions with clinicians. I joined as the only designer to redesign and improve the whole mobile app experience as well as develop a UX practice within the company. 7 Cups has been in market for 5+ years and has a large active user base.
The core question
The mobile app had a handful of problems: it was basically the website wrapped into an app, features had no clear organization, and frustrated users were leaving. A new California grant added pressure — how do you build a modern, mobile-first experience, fast?
Project facts
Timeline
Joined 2019 for the mobile app redesign, launched summer 2020
My role
UX design, user research, visual design
Team configuration
Sole designer with head of product, engineering, and clinical psychology
Analyzing the existing experience
7 Cups has a large web user base but has struggled to create a usable mobile app experience. I began by analyzing the entire product experience across platforms.
Using the existing mobile app and web experience I quickly took screenshots and notes on areas I felt needed to be improved. This analysis continued by diagramming all UX flows in the product.
There were many issues uncovered across the product’s user experience. Most notably was a lack of focus, giving users too many options, which led to unnecessarily complex and redundant user flows.
7 Cups personas are struggling with various emotional and mental health issues. This created unique challenges when it came to designing an effective user experience. For example: trust, hand-holding, and focus became paramount principles as I interviewed users.
Understanding the users
Employing various methodologies I studied different user groups and feature usability to understand how to best improve aspects of the overall product experience and features.
I frequently leveraged the existing 7 Cups community to run surveys. This proved to be an invaluable resource for quickly getting user feedback on existing and prototype experiences.
Design and iteration
After analyzing a wealth of user and stakeholder feedback I began the journey of wireframing, prototyping, periodic usability studies, and hi-fi designs throughout all features of the mobile app.
For the various features being redesigned, I worked with wireframes and prototypes to test with the 7 Cups community and gather user feedback to iterate on the design details.
Study insight: Across the screen comparisons, the majority of respondents felt the new designs were “more professional,” “calmer,” and “modern.”
Shipping and impact
As engineers implemented the designs - and the team’s focus was prioritized - some features were cut. In instances where it was a major feature I designed a stand-in experience in its place.
The images below show a progression: from a sketch of a core feature called the Path, to a high-fidelity prototype I shared with the full product team, to the stand-in experience created when the full feature was deprioritized for the first new-app release.
In preparation for a public release, I developed a feature highlighting strategy and created the assets for publishing the app to Google Play and the App Store.
