Ameliate CBT VR and Web Suite
Client:
Project Management, UX/UI Design, Prototyping, Development, Audio Design, Game Design, Design Leadership
Ameliate
Role:
Year:
CEO
2020
Year:
2020
URL:
VR, Web, Mobile
Company Background and Project Goals:
At Ameliate, a company I co-founded with EIT alumni, our mission was to build innovative psychological applications. Together with my team, we developed a suite of psychological VR apps, showcasing our design studio’s capabilities in VR-based mental health interventions. The highlight of this suite was CBT-VR, a cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) experience crafted specifically for virtual reality.
Expanding Accessibility with a Web App:
In addition to the VR app suite, we designed and developed a self-help CBT web app. I led the research, design, and development phases to ensure it was accessible to both individual users and healthcare professionals. The app included a free version for consumers, while a more comprehensive, advanced version was tailored for professional use.
Features and Functionality:
The CBT web app featured an immersive exercise based on situational triggers, designed to assess users' distress levels, emotions, physical sensations, and life context. It also highlighted cognitive biases that might affect users’ interpretations of challenging situations. To support ongoing progress, we created a dashboard where users could review their session history, while therapists could monitor client progress in the commercial version.
Design Process and Iterative Refinement:
Our process began with a small-scale research project into self-help CBT, which evolved into the current feature-rich app through user-centered design. We conducted interviews with therapists and potential end users to gather insights on their needs and preferences. This feedback informed subsequent iterations of the app, leading to positive responses and improved user experience in further usability tests.
Impact and Early Findings:
The app underwent user studies, showing promising initial results in user engagement and efficacy. The positive feedback received highlighted the value of accessible mental health tools, reinforcing the importance of a design-first approach in psychological applications.
Design Process
For Ameliate's web and VR applications, we pursued participatory design as the main guideline for our design process. What is particular about participatory design is including the users in the entire process (similarly to co-designing solutions). We recruited both therapists and people in therapy to provide their input in regular intervals when reaching certain milestones in the design and development process. This would in turn help us with the direction, requirements, and even the visual style we would take going forward.
Diary Study and Problem Discovery
The entire concept of Ameliate's CBT web suite was spawned out of a diary study I conducted in the University of Twente. The promising results and feedback from the initial test user lead me to continue and improve on the design, resulting in the first release of the CBT Web app. Findings included ease and speed of use, while points of improvement arose from the choice of displaying multiple options in the application. These would be remedied in following iterations.
Design
After the first prototype, me and my team refined the visual appearance of the design and the user experience. We frequently ran quick evaluative studies with test users to gather feedback during the course of the design process. The test users were potential end users as well as mental healthcare professionals. User feedback helped us make the application more engaging and more thorough by introducing clearer and more interactive choices of emotions, topics, and cognitive biases. Later iterations also included progress tracking and navigation within the web application.
User Research
Besides the quick evaluative studies we conducted during the design, I also lead more extensive user interviews and surveying focused on how the applications might improve the mood of the users. The most striking finding was that test users felt a decrease in negative moods after using the application as measured by the Brief Mood Introspection Scale (BMIS), which let us know we were on the right track in building our medical applications.
Further Development and Pilot Study
Based on the results of the user research, we refined the application by making interactions more natural (especially for the case of the VR app). Our CBT-VR app entered pilot testing at the Psychiatric Hospital of Vilnius and the results confirmed our earlier findings of mood improvement caused by the application. While the results of the pilot study were positive, the application didn't enter further clinical studies at the institution.
Phases
Ideation
Could a self-administered software-based CBT solution help people?
Research
What components of CBT could be viably implemented to an application?
Wireframe Prototype
How would the user go through the steps?
Diary Study
Does the prototype help the user in their daily life?
Think Aloud
What does the user think while using the application?
Interview
What does the user think of the product?
Visual Design
Make it more aesthetically pleasing.
Private Beta
What other improvements can be made?
Public Release
... and continuous development. Nothing is ever perfect.