The Problem
The kids aren’t alright.
California’s Department of Health and Human Services partnered with Kooth and IDEO to ask: how might we support young people in getting the care they need to be mentally well, statewide and for free?
As Co-Lead Interaction Designer, I worked alongside the Kooth team, client partners, developers, researchers, and clinical stakeholders over 10 months — from first sketch to beta — shaping the app’s onboarding, tools, content, community, and coaching. Soluna launched on iOS and Android on January 1, 2024, in English and Spanish.
The Process
Knowing the weight of this challenge, I prioritized continuous research learning loops throughout this project. I closely collaborated with young people and psychiatric providers to balance creating a space for young people while maintaining clinical efficacy.
More from the research: designing a dream app, collaging what a “goal” feels like, brainstorming content formats, and a coaching-critique feedback session.
Working with Young People
Over the course of a year I spoke with over 150 young people, both in Dscout sessions and through the project co-design council! Asking both generative and evaluative questions helped me understand how to create an app that felt like a home for young people. I asked our co-design council about everything from how they visualize emotion, to what information would be important to know about a mental health coach.
From working with young people, I learned three big things.
Working with Providers
Through my collaboration with the physicians, nurses and psychologists in our clinical oversight group, I was able to create a theory of change for this work, in addition to selecting a psychological framework for the activities in the tools section.
In collaboration with the clinical oversight group, I designed tools and activities in alignment with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy principles. Knowing that ACT was centered in discovering a persons values and aligning their life to it, felt right when working with young people, who all to often are told what they should value and work towards.
The Solution
Soluna is a digital mental wellbeing toolkit meant to address the growing need for mental health content, coaching and tools for young people in California.
Key pathways
Content
Learning about mental wellbeing is an important part of developing a young person’s resilience. However, in today’s changing world, there’s more holding their attention that ever. When I set out to create content, I wanted to have a clear path to progress, and different types of content for different types of learners.
Each content theme (like living with anxiety or body image) is grouped into a constellation. Each constellation has:
Stories
Educational tappable mico bits of information on the topic.
Quizzes
Swipable questions to test young people’s knowledge around a topic.
Scenarios
Text scenarios that help young people apply the topic to a challenge in their real life.
Tools
With the tools pathway, I wanted to give young people a place to feel calmer in the moment. With a unique combination of clinically validated familiar tools like breathwork, journaling and a noise cleanse, and some new tools to try. Our novel artistic tools included:
starboard: a haptic feedback figdet for when young people need a distraction to get through a momen t
Let it out: a tool that listens to young people rant, and then helps them fling it out of sight
thought shaker: a magic mirror that provides affirmations to shake all the negative thoughts from their heads.
Coaching
I created the coaching platform alongside developing the service design for how coaching will work from a business perspective.
Young people sometimes needed help in the moment, in addition to continued or scheduled support. With coaching there’s two options:
drop in hours: get in a queue to talk to someone as soon as possible
or
scheduled coaching session: young people can browse through coaches to find the right coach for them, and schedule at a recurring time that works.
All coaches are briefed on the crisis escalation pathway and prepared to refer to local resources if young people are in crisis.
Wrap Up
Soluna launched in January of 2024 and has over 40,000 daily users across multiple counties in california. It’s been such a success that other states such as new jersey have been working to soluna implemented as a free resource in their state as well.
I put my heart and soul into soluna and it remains one of my favorite projects in my career thus far.
“This is so cool. I feel like I actually get mental health now that it’s put into a context I get.” — Miley, Soluna user