Helping IPCH and Movember tackle tough mental health convos, using Design Sprints and Generative AI
More than 4 out of 10 tradies experience mental health and wellbeing setbacks.
With up to 30% of the Australian workforce affected by this topic, we were honoured to co-design a new app for tradies, with tradies. No Moss joined the mission with IPC Health, HALT, and the Movember Foundation, to create a free and AI-supported app that helps tradies check in with each other.
Whilst working with IPC Health and Movember Foundation, the team chose to use Design Sprints (the 2.0 kind, by AJ&Smart) and continuous discovery through Dual Track Development.
We’re fans of these methods as they helped the team avoid common pitfalls of innovation projects often seen on other ventures. You know the feeling:
- Teams spread across departments derailed by “project fatigue”
- A top-down imperative to “innovate” but with no clear vision of why the work has to be done, or who is benefitting from it
- Work stuck in development hell, even when adhering to Agile ceremonies
Bolstered by our ways of working, the design team rose up and solved well defined challenges and opportunities, made light work of prioritisation, and stayed focused and joyful in serving the needs of tradies.
These design, discovery and development processes offered a common language for all project stakeholders and team members to communicate with, resulting in fast and constant alignment throughout the entire 3 month project.
“The interactive prototypes and user interviews in the No Moss Design Sprints delighted our key stakeholders, who quickly bought into the vision of the project. Ultimately the team estimated saving seven weeks of delivery time by working this way.”
IPC Health Innovation Lead
Read on below 👇 for a detailed Process Showcase of how to bake Design Sprints and Dual Track Development into your product and innovation workflows. Please drop a comment or question below with how these processes succeed or flopped in your projects; and we’d love to hear from you, send a hello to amy@nomoss.co!
How we did it: Process showcase
Total project time: 2 week No Moss inception and design sprint, + 8 weeks build
About the client
IPC Health (IPCH) is a not-for-profit healthcare provider, caring for the traditionally underserved populations of Melbourne’s Western suburbs. IPCH knew that young tradies of Melbourne’s Western suburbs wanted to check in with their workmates about their mental health, but didn’t know how to go about it without coming off as pushy and judgemental. No Moss worked with IPCH to bring to life their mental health app in 3 months.
Step 1: Using Design Sprints to design a meaningful and useful app
No Moss used the AJ&Smart 4-day Design Sprint process to surface IPCH’s most pressing challenges and opportunities, create a beautiful working prototype, and test it with real tradies, in just 4 days. These powerful workshops helped ensure we build the right product first, before building the product right.
The team approached working on a mental health product with care, long-term consideration and ensured that the right voices were telling the story. Using Design Sprints, the team co-designed with 30 tradies, listening to their unique and individual voices and design input. Tradie mental health experts, licensed counsellors, and representatives from suicide prevention charities also participated in the Design Sprints and contributed to the mental health app, called Chop Out Convos.
Capturing crucial feedback early and consistently was the key to success; it even saved us seven weeks of development time later on.
This looked like:
- Aligning on long term goals, sprint questions, customer journey map
- Sharing inspiration through lightning demos, concept sketching
- Creation of a hi-fidelity, click through prototype, ready for onsite testing with tradies at a Victorian Trade School
- User testing synthesis blitzed into an iteration sprint, where important feedback and questions from the first concept sprint were reflected on and answered
“A lot of key stakeholders aligned with such clarity in No Moss Design Sprints. This is a keenly watched and evaluated project;
No Moss set a clear course for releasing the MVP in 3 months.”IPCH Innovation Lead
Step 2: Using Dual Track Development to build the app, led by tradie insights
Once the Design Sprints were completed, we had a good idea of what the app looked like and how tradies responded to it, so we proceeded to build it by kicking off a Lean Product Inception to align the project Mission and Product Vision, and establish the MVP scope and prioritisation of the product backlog. This 3-day process bridges the worlds of design and technology, setting the team up to deliver the project using Dual Track Development.
Our designers and developers worked closely together, responding to customer feedback and new user discoveries in an intensely short time frame. Our development team intimately knew the concept and target vision for the product, which meant we could evaluate tech solutions along the way, accurately estimate effort in planning, and minimise project waste. Every artefact produced directly influenced decision making, with the outcome being a scalable solution with zero tech debt!
This resulted in:
- Ruthless prioritisation and backlogging
- Key insights coming from user testing throughout the build timeline
- And responding quickly to user testing insights
This collaboration between design, discovery and delivery helped us effectively incorporate OpenAI’s GPT3. We were all excited about the prospect of working with real-time AI and machine learning, and we dived head-first into utilising it whilst building in the ethical boundaries defined by our target customers, helping to contain machine learning in the app.
Step 3: Final round of testing with tradies, to validate the launch in the app store
We ran a final round of user testing, prior to submitting the app to the Apple app store. 45+ tradies downloaded the app and provided feedback, which informed the next steps and future roadmap of the app.
The app is currently awaiting final approval and we are looking forward to the day it becomes publicly accessible in the App Store!
Our tools that we used
- AJ&Smart Design Sprint 2.0
- Figma, design software
- Basecamp, project management and communication
- Miro, lightweight task tracker and online whiteboarding
- Mixpanel, tracking analytics
- Ionic and Vue.js, frontend framework for building hybrid mobile apps
- OpenAI’s GPT-3, deep learning natural language processor
- AWS SAM and Lambda, cloud based serverless backend platform
- Bitrise, continuous integration and deployment platform with iOS build support
- Cypress and Jest, automated application testing tools
- Stoplight, API mocking and documentation tool
- GitLab, version control and continuous integration platform
A sincere thank you to Michael Smart for his contributions to this article, and to the product team at No Moss for their work on this app.
