My journey of creating YouMatter, a mental health app with PMDojo

YouMatter is a webapp that enables working professionals between 18 and 45 to find time to journal consistently per their schedule. YouMatter helps people who cannot find time to journal in their busy lives.?

Check out YouMatter here:?https://lnkd.in/gwabBFTp

I have travelled through multiple industries in the past ten years and have worn several hats. In every step of my professional journey, I observed I had created or optimized something, a product or a process. The pandemic was eye-opening when I realized how technology had been an integral part of our lives. That’s when I decided to move back to technology and resume my journey of creating tech products.?

After my first interaction with Bosky Mukherjee , I knew PMDojo was the best platform for me to work with other Product Managers, Founders, Product Leaders, Developers and Designers to develop and launch a product. My journey over the last ten weeks couldn’t have been more fulfilling. My learning from the cohort and my team members of YouMatter has been tremendous.?A massive shoutout to Eki Okubanjo, PSM, PSPO , Iris Shen , Shadae Pickett , and Sripriya Visweswaran for making YouMatter possible in 10 weeks.

Also, as a part of the industry track, our mentors,?Joshua?and?Prerna, were incredible. Their guidance was instrumental for our team to develop such a spectacular product in the Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) space. If you struggle to find time in your busy schedule to journal and jot down your thoughts or sometimes find yourself in thought chaos, we, the YouMatter team, have developed this for you!

A recent research from Gallup reveals that employees experience high levels of burnout during these times -? 63% are more likely to take a sick day, 13% feel less confident in their performance and 23% are more likely to visit the emergency room. When we conducted user interviews and spoke with people, we realized they did understand the importance of journaling and how it could help their mental health better. The main challenges are either people are too busy to find some quiet time to journal or they find journaling too monotonous of a job. At YouMatter, we prioritized making journaling fun and enabling our users to find some time to reflect on their day. We understand people sometimes wish to record a voice note or draw a picture to reflect. YouMatter will remind you to journal when you think you can and how you feel works best for you.

Upon analyzing our user interviews, surveys and research, we noticed working professionals aged between 18 and 45 find it challenging to journal consistently because they need to prioritize journaling over other things, which causes them to disengage with the journaling platform, YouMatter. Our goal with this project is to address this challenge. With YouMatter, we are on a journey to enable people to find time to journal and enjoy it.

To understand how YouMatter could help, let me introduce you to Andrea. Andrea is a busy single working mom of two kids. Maintaining a balance between work and home is challenging for her. There are loads of thoughts in her mind. Sometimes Andrea thinks the mental chaos is too much to handle. A few years ago, her therapist suggested she journal, and she started doing it. But with a busy life like this, journaling soon became sporadic and eventually disappeared from her life. She understands how jotting down her daily thoughts help her improve her life and keeps her calm, but she doesn’t find time to sit quietly and write.?

At YouMatter, we aim to help such individuals improve their mental health by increasing the engagement and retention of users. We have created a product that will smoothly integrate journaling into our users’ lives and make it engaging and fun. Imagine someone reminding you when you are free for a minute to reflect upon your day the way you want! You don’t need to write down your thoughts. You can journal by recording audio; you can draw a picture to represent your thoughts or click an image to cherish it later. You can design your journaling journey with your personalized themes and music!??

When we sit and analyze our day, it reduces our stress and anxiety. It enables us to be more productive and maintain better relationships. This is precisely what we are trying to do with YouMatter. With such an engaging and enjoyable way of journaling, we are confident Andrea will get clarity about her thoughts and stay organized.?

According to the World Health Organization, 6.4% struggle with mental illness. Burnout. Languishing. The Great Resignation. These are all widespread phenomena due to prolonged neglect of our emotions. Journaling is a widely used non-pharmacological tool for coaching, counselling, and treating mental illness. Expressive writing and Gratitude writing are two forms of journaling that are particularly common in psychotherapy (Sohal et al., 2022)

We conducted several rounds of user research exercises and interviews and received responses from more than 120 individuals to understand what journaling means to them, if they understand the value of journaling and what could attract them to journal. Based on our user research, interviews, and competitive analysis, we created our first Empathy Map and User Journey Map.

A deep insight into a user’s empathy and journey on such CBT apps allowed us to understand how we can motivate them to stay and engage more. We realized four main challenges users face are,

• Difficulty prioritizing time to journal
• Can’t express thoughts the way they wish
• Lack of motivation
• Privacy

With learnings like this, we designed our first Concept Sketch

Our concept sketches gave us a basic idea of how we want to build YouMatter and helped us design our Prototypes.

After we validated our prototype, we started developing our minimum viable product (MVP) on Bubble. At this point, we were confident of what we wanted to achieve with YouMatter. So finalizing our success metrics was relatively less challenging.?

While working on developing metrics, we had one more task - to design the userflow. Miro was such an excellent tool to illustrate such complex flows.

Determining a metric that perfectly aligns with our business goals and values while solving user challenges was quite a task. We wanted to track user adoption and retention rate, as our primary business goals were to acquire and retain users.?

Some users journal daily, and some prefer journaling weekly. As we aim to improve engagement and increase retention, the number of active users per week could be an excellent metric to measure the success of YouMatter. Also, the average number of journal entries per user per week could be another metric to keep an eye on. This will show us how enjoyable we have made journaling. So our two North Star metrics are,

• Number of returning active users who journal per week
• Average number of journal entries per user per week

With such deep insights into users’ minds and an understanding of their needs, we adopted the MoSCoW methodology to design our MVP and prioritize our offerings. Creating a secure private space for our users to journal and remind them at their preferred time to use YouMatter were two crucial parts of our MVP. Therefore we prioritized these two features in our first sprint to launch our MVP. We prioritized our offerings based on the RICE framework and planned all future sprints up to Q2 2023.

Prioritized considerations:

• User sign-up and log-in: When a user wishes to use YouMatter to journal, the user should be able to create an account using a personal email address, name, and password of personal choice. The user will then receive an email to verify the intention to join our platform.?
• User profile: The user can see details like name and personal settings and will also have the option to log out.
• Multiple forms of journaling options: This feature empowers users to journal however they wish. Currently, users can journal through writing, art or images. Users can also tag their journal entries to revisit later.
• Customized reminders: Users can also create their journaling reminders on YouMatter. Such reminders can act as a motivation to journal and let the users find some dedicated journaling time in their busy schedules.

Email Reminder:?

Our future considerations are,

• Allowing users to tag their journals and be able to search in future using tags
• Improve gamification of YouMatter
• Rendering content based on users' goals
• Providing analytical insight into users’ journey in the app

Our main goal was to build YouMatter keeping these core functionalities in mind. The user stories we considered for our MVP are,

What’s next?

1. We are working to integrate analytics into YouMatter, which will enable our users to track their progress.??
2. Enable our users to set goals. We are confident that goal setting will motivate our users to journal consistently.
3. Enabling our users to search their past journal entries using the tags?

Upon completing this? phase, our goals are;??

1. Gamify YouMatter to reward users who journal consistently.?
2. Enabling users to share their journal entries outside of the app with their near and dear ones.
3. Add more informative Mental Health content on YouMatter. Such information and content will motivate users to spend more time on YouMatter and increase engagement

In my last 10 weeks at PMDojo I learned so many things working with my YouMatter teammates. One of my key lessons was sometimes product managers fall into the trap of looking at the data in a way to satisfy their hypothesis. It is crucial to stay unbiased and let the users lead you in the direction they choose.?

Also, in many instances, we all had to pivot. While developing a product, the process can surprise you many times in ways you'd not have anticipated. It is vital to have an iterative mindset and be willing to pivot if users and data show you a different path.

My journey at PMDojo with my colleagues has been spectacular. Looking forward to hearing your feedback on our MVP.