Introduction

            The Future Founder program assigned me and three other colleagues a task to create a solution for mental health illness in the Covid-19 pandemic as a group and present it as a hackathon, a fast presentation where a company has to present the design thinking of the product, the reason for the idea and the researches made to understand why this product is a solution for the problem.

            Design Thinking has five steps: Empathy, the step where research and data are the most important - gather information about the customers and the target audience; Define, where the team has to organize themself for what each one is going to perform in the project; Ideate, the ‘brainstorm’ phase is for every member of the team share their ideas and develop an idea based on the two earlier steps; Prototype, the idea must be an actual product and be on beta stage, this step has the objective to understand the failures, develop the storyboard, build a strategy and gather feedback from your last customers; and Test, the stage when the crew has to understand the paths that went well and the failures and to organize the remaining pieces for a successful project.

               My colleagues and I selected an idea that I came up with: an AI that assists university students in this moment of Covid-19 social isolation. The main objective is to help them to have a conversation with something and express their feelings in this harmful time when these students have to stay at home, can’t have a social presence, and have to stay in a lonely and sometimes stressful place: their houses and, more specifically, their bedrooms. This harmful environment can be a trigger for many mental illnesses, developing or increasing some; anxiety, depression, and stress are the main illnesses we focused on in our project, but there are so many others to discuss.

 

The Product

            Thinking about our main problem, the idea was to create and develop a robot almost like Alexa, who should be an AI with software developed with psychological assistance and therapy foundation.
            The main goal was to make this robot have a conversation with our persona and through the conversation and daily analysis, it comes up with phrases and an actual discussion about the persona’s life and mental health illnesses based on the therapists and psychological assistance data.

With some conversations about the project with my teammates, feedback, market analysis, and discussion, Metal Health Team decided to continue with the idea of an AI to assist the university student with their mental health picture, but instead of a robot we choose to have an app and we follow this idea in the next steps, improving the app, data, information, target audience and using in each of these phases the Design Thinking steps.

 

            Empathy: We found that the university students were one of the most affected profiles aged between 18 and 21 years due to a questionnaire in Google Forms - with 80 responses -, internet survey and also because it is a public that we have a sort of connection and some relationships.
            At the survey, we selected six questions to ask our audience to come up with simple responses: if the person already had some mental health illnesses before the quarantine and the pandemic worsened, or the pandemic was a trigger for a decrease in the psychological picture. For those who developed it or worsened during this harmful environment, we asked how the illnesses were between anxiety, depression, stress, and others. These answers help us to develop some ideas for our project.

 

            Define: After we analyzed our 80 responses, our persona, who we named Enzo, was based on the age of our majority answers (18 to 21 years old). After that, it was possible to define what was our problem statement based on the needs of our persona and the insights of our project we made through discussions, conversations, and feedback.

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            Ideate: Knowing what our problem statement was and the persona we should develop the project for, our crew started to brainstorm some ideas to know each one was the most promising one. Everybody brought two different ideas, so we had a wide range of choices and different kinds of projects. So, among all the promising brainstorming ideas, we decided to improve and develop the idea that I came up with, an intelligent robot with an AI inside developed to assist university students and other profiles who had their mental health decreased during the social isolation period. MOM, an acronym for Mental Orientation Mechfriend, came up after the crew came up with different ideas and paths that we should lead our project based on our persona, previous research, and the response of our FutureFounder facilitators.

 

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            Prototype: After our idea was set, it was time to start prototyping our MOM (not the parent, the project). After long discussions about accessibility and market analysis, the idea of ​​developing a robot was changed and we decided to create an app with the same features and goals, but more accessible and less expensive.

            As we were developing the app, understanding how the design should be and how we are going to build it were the principal tasks. To reach out to customers, we had to make a clear and relaxing app, with big icons and with a calm design. The colors we choose, both light blue and green and white are because it is an easy marriage of colors and each one of them has a purpose. The light green is a color that reflects hope, health, and vitality. The blue is tranquility, harmony, and serenity.

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            Test: To conclude our project we had to know if our audience would approve the app. For that, we entered the testing phase and decided to collect feedback from our relationships and close people who were similar to our persona. Continuing the process, we took our test product and developed a questionnaire for each one of the team, selecting two or three people and have their answers about what are the features they have liked if the app had a pleasant design, what could be improved, if they had some ideas to be added for the project and if they felt comfortable talking to an AI.

            After the feedback of our profiles and a last discussion with the team, we implemented some suggestions and improved our project due to the feedback of our interviewees, concluding the steps of Design Thinking, and starting to get ready for the FutureFounder Demo Day, when we had to present MOM.

 

FutureFounder Demo Day

            At Demo Day we had to present our pitch to our FutureFounder colleagues and three special guests. A pitch is a short presentation where the crew has to convince the audience that they have a significant project and that they should buy your idea.

          We presented MOM to some experts on the innovation and entrepreneurship subject, such as Sam Magee, Laura Escobar, and Fabio Prado who gave us feedback on how we did in trying to sell our product and what they think about our idea, our presentation, and the impact they had about MOM.

 

Key Takeaways

            In conclusion, the Design Thinking method and all the knowledge I gained during this hackathon is going to be helpful during my period at a startup, and it's a great practice for everyone who has to develop a product and does not know how to start it.

            Collaboration with teammates is the first tip because when I had to think outside the box and improve the project or give a step back and analyze from another point of view, they were crucial in that point. The second tip is to listen to feedback and always try to ask for it. Any project can be released if it does not have feedback because it helps to understand what is going wrong, why something should be changed, and also what is going right and should be improved.