Project overview
Linkmate connects members (people seeking help) with mates (trained peers) who want to help them. The platform aims to create prevention methods for mental health issues before they become extreme through peer support, active-empathetic listening, and social prescribing.
Roles and Responsibilities
I led the team focused on mates interviewing, ideating, prototyping and user testing the mates’ design, facilitating the design workshop for mates. Additionally, I contributed to the members side by doing desktop research, competitor analysis, interviewing members, and the client presentation.
User Problem
Young Australians need someone to talk to and are looking for a service that connects them to others with a similar lived experience.
Business needs
Enhance engagement, traction, and retention. Streamline the user experience for both users
Solution
- Mates want to grow their understanding of mental health and provide real support by connecting with others who share their lived experiences. The value they get is growth in their career and a broadening of their cultural understanding regarding mental health
- Young Australians need someone to talk to and are looking for a service that connects them to others with a similar lived experience.
Peer support training, easy onboarding, and announcing to members why they’re on link-mate.
- Additionally, the quick wins for the members were mood tracking, Messaging a mate, and voice messaging.
Learnings
Going into the project, I was most concerned about the appropriate way to ask questions about mental health. Asking research questions indirectly while ensuring they were not leading helped me achieve this. I believe it has prepared me well for forming research questions that deliver good results while staying respectful of the users interviewed. Due to our team being quite big, there wasn’t a clear team approach, collaboration was ok until this became evident as an issue when we had to decide on the design MVP. I took the lead alongside another classmate and we helped organise the team’s efforts, I did this by acknowledging that we were stuck, outlining the most simple and valuable ideas we had discovered while asking for consensus so we could move forward on these ideas.