myStrength Mobile App

Overview

myStrength is a digital behavioral health platform that provides evidence-based tools, inspiration, and support for managing conditions such as depression, anxiety, stress, substance use, insomnia, chronic pain, and more. myStrength is made available to members as a responsive web application and native iOS and Android mobile apps.

Problem

myStrength had developed a robust, feature-rich web application that supported multiple conditions, tools, and modern features. Their native mobile apps, however, hadn’t been updated in years. As a result, there was no feature parity with the web app, and the overall experience was wildly divergent from the core product. In addition, the lack of user engagement, poor user satisfaction results, and its buggy performance had made it clear that it was time to overhaul the native mobile myStrength product.

Process

Research, prototype, and validate

We partnered with Zurb early on for their usability expertise and to help us validate what we knew to be true about our web product, our users, and how we would best translate that into a native mobile experience. After our engagement, we had successfully validated outstanding assumptions, documented multiple insights, and had a fully functioning prototype to serve as a loose blueprint for our project.

From prototype to production

We began this phase by establishing requirements for our initial release and determining what was critical for launch and which features would ship in subsequent releases. Once conditions were in place, design moved forward in tandem with development. Engineering focused on plumbing new APIs while I created multiple primary screen designs using the myStrength visual design language with various layouts applied. At the end of this design phase, I had established a lean design system and final art direction for the app.

Throughout the course of our project, the visual design of the mobile app became more defined. We used a suite of tools, including Sketch, Marvel, Haiku, Lottie, and Zeplin, to prototype, test, and deliver production-ready assets and animations to the development team.

We would design and test each feature in sprints, and the deliverable would then be developed on the engineering side in the following sprint. This process proved to work well. The product, development, and QA teams worked in concert from start to finish over several months resulting in a successful initial release in the App Store and Google Play as scheduled.

Results

This project was a big win for the company and the team members involved. The new version of the myStrength iOS and Android apps were shipped within the deadline, delivered all of the targeted functionality we had scoped at the start of this project, and set the foundation for many subsequent product enhancements in upcoming releases. This project was a big win for myStrength’s users as well.

Aside from the significantly improved usability and modern experience, the mobile apps now provided feature parity and interoperability with the web platform. In addition, user engagement, increased downloads, and a significant reduction in poor negative feedback were strong indicators that we delivered a successful v2 of the mobile product.

Update: After the Livongo acquisition and Teladoc merger, a third version of the myStrength mobile app was released in July 2021. Unfortunately, this version of the myStrength app is no longer available in the Google Play or App Store.