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5 ways to think about mental health in design

At this point in time, if your product doesn’t take mental health into consideration, your product isn’t considering people.

We all know how stressful life has been recently. But what may need more emphasis in the design world is that aside from poor design causing frustration for customers, ambiguity can also trigger and compound anxiety.

Product designers frequently balance multiple considerations about customers while creating new experiences, but what’s not often talked about is the impact our work can have on people’s different mental states.

At Goodreads, the onset of the pandemic also aligned with an internal transformation. We committed to iteratively rebuilding our core CX in order to better serve our members. And we started to invest in that foundational work with a renewed focus on inclusion and accessibility, including designing for mental health.

While not a comprehensive list by any means, here are five ways we are designing to support our customers’ mental health on Goodreads:

People are busy. They may be distracted by life, work, or by stress and anxiety. People should be able to easily locate the information they need, without running into overwhelming imagery or walls of text that may be frustrating, confusing, and cause them to abandon the experience altogether.

At Goodreads, we created a simplified new design for our friend updates email to better focus on the social activity that recipients expected to see there.

The original design included all friend updates in the email body, with as much information as possible about each book. But for people who follow a lot of reviewers or authors, this design was overwhelming. Plus, thoughtfully written reviews were often buried by others’ shelving activity.

To balance providing helpful book information with social updates, we swapped the long, publisher-written descriptions about each book for simpler genre tags. We were then able to keep the focus of this email on friends’ written reviews, ratings, and/or shelvings.

Customers also let us know that seeing several updates from one person in a row could be overwhelming. Taking that feedback into account, we created a rule to only show a couple of updates per person, with a link to more of their activity.

We want our customers to feel good about engaging with our product. Unclear CTAs can cause confusion, anxiety, and even mistrust.

For example, at Goodreads, we recently simplified the design of our banners, which we use to direct people to new content and recommendations.

In our previous illustration-focused template, the copy and “Explore” CTA were too generic. While we loved being creative with the imagery, the overall intent of the banner was unclear to customers: They were unsure whether a click would take them to a general genre page or an ad landing page, rather than to the new content we were trying to promote.

Getting more specific with our copy and CTA provided customers with better context and understanding of what they were clicking on.

Although we generally seek to include fun, relevant illustrations with our genre week content, we realized they were too busy to work well in this banner space. Instead, our simpler template reduced customers’ cognitive load by utilizing iconography in this smaller placement as a quickly understandable visual aid. The simplified design also complemented a top-level, site-wide placement akin to our current interface.

Our copy choices should help make it easy for people to use our product intuitively, and eliminate any confusion or anxiety.

Writing good UX copy often means stripping out what isn’t strictly necessary in order to keep our experiences scannable. But great UX copy is deceptively simple, working on multiple levels and helping people intuitively understand how to use our product across the experience.

From these few words, our members can also intuit that their ratings and shelving activity on Goodreads is used to personalize their book discovery experiences — helping them understand how the actions they take within our product affect the recommendations they receive.

We respect and protect our customers’ privacy, and want customers to feel confident when sharing information. We only request customer information we absolutely need, and let members know why we need it, and how it will be used. This transparency helps eliminate anxiety, and allows people to fully enjoy our features.

We should always give customers options for moving forward within our product, that are relevant and personalized to where they are within their experience.

“What should I do now?” should be something people ask only briefly, when feeling interested in different pathways that lead them towards equally tempting experiences.

We don’t want people asking this question because they feel stuck, or like they failed. And if they do get stuck, we want to provide them with a way to get back to a happy path.

These could be related recommendations or content, like on Goodreads’ new limited-beta book page that we’re testing. Or it could be helpful text on our error pages directing members where to go for help.

Recommended by Erik Homsapaya, art director

When galleries closed down during the pandemic I sought out more art online, but large format print books felt closer to the physical and analog experience that art seekers were unable to find during the pandemic. As a fan of Matisse, it is fascinating to learn, in long form, about the journey and backstory behind the creation of this totally new style at the time, which has inspired trends up to now. As a designer, it is comforting knowing that such a renown name, at the peak of his career, still had to deal with his work being rejected by clients. Even this cut-out approach to making art was a new response to a serious, unforeseen health issue that prevented him from creating art the way he did his entire life. The very formation of this style was purely functional, for accessibility reasons, as he needed to discover new methods to create works of art, without the ability to stand or the physical strength to sculpt and paint. His new technique might have also led to the creation of one the first modern art zines. An inspiring life and body of work for any fan of the visual arts.

Recommended by Seth Goldstein, senior product designer

Recommended by Julie Lockhart, senior product designer

I read Michelle Obama’s memoir at the beginning of the pandemic. I got lost in her reflections of growing up in Chicago, Law school, early days in her career and with Barack Obama, and balancing the demand of motherhood. With humor and grace she describes the good and ugly side of life in the Whitehouse and navigating her role as First Lady, and finding her footing again as the days in politics came to an end. I gained a deep respect for her character, wisdom and appreciated her candor and humility.

Recommended by Alana Lindner, head of design and research

This book helped me work through some of the frustrations, questions, and confusions I had during the pandemic around racism and hate. If we can’t talk about it, we can’t chart a course for change. This book highlighted the behaviors that get in the way of understanding how we see others and see ourselves. My hope is that we can work through the discomfort to make real change happen within ourselves to combat racism in our communities. It’s a long road but one worth traveling.

Recommended by Whitney Patel, senior design researcher

Recommended by Karen Liu, lead product designer

During the pandemic, I embarked upon a personal journey to understand more deeply the racial conflicts that have plagued America for centuries. One book stood above the rest; The Color of Law should be required reading for all American history classes in public schools. It was not until I read this book that I realized how white-washed the history books I was required to read in public school truly are. Just as the title claims, the book outlines a forgotten history of segregation and how its impacts last until today. It is insidious to have such state-sponsored racial amnesia, as though purposely trying to absolve us of guilt and deter corrective action. In the past year, I took heart in the fact that there are now authors like Rothstein who help illuminate our collective paths towards racial justice.

Recommended by Brooke Ginnard, brand and visual product designer

This blew me away. I expected to be sad and angry after reading this book, and I was. But I didn’t expect to also find it so relatable and even, dare I say, funny at times. I cried, but mostly I cheered for Chanel. Her ability to channel her strength and fight for what’s right, or even to allow herself to grow in different ways, is so inspiring.

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