Origo
DURATION
September - November 2024
PROJECT TYPE
Product Design Concept
MY ROLE
UX Designer (team of 2)
Overview
People living with serious mental health conditions — bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia, personality disorders — typically navigate a complex web of appointments, providers, medications, and referrals. The system places a significant coordination burden on the people least equipped to carry it.
Origo is a mobile app concept designed to address that directly: one place for appointments, secure messaging with care providers, medication tracking, medical records, and daily wellbeing tools. The name reflects the core idea — a fixed centre point from which everything else radiates.
This project was completed as part of a university course.
Problem
How can a digital service give people with serious mental health conditions genuine control over their own treatment — reducing fragmentation and supporting self-management in everyday life?
Official data from the Norwegian Directorate of Health shows that people with serious mental health conditions average 17 outpatient contacts per year across multiple services. The result is predictable: missed appointments, fragmented records, poor communication between providers, and patients who feel like passive recipients rather than active participants in their own care.
The design challenge was not to build another health information portal — it was to create something that genuinely shifts the balance of control toward the user.
Discover & Define
Understanding the problem space
We began with a structured insight phase: a competitive analysis of existing health and mental health apps, followed by a survey to understand how users currently experience the treatment system and what they most needed from a digital tool.
The landscape was fragmented — many single-purpose solutions existed (appointment reminders, medication trackers, messaging tools) but nothing that integrated these into a coherent experience. Users were expected to manage their own coordination across multiple apps and platforms.
Three consistent needs emerged from the research:
A single, trustworthy overview of appointments, medications, and communications
The ability to track and reflect on their own wellbeing over time — not just receive information passively
Clearer, faster communication with care providers without navigating separate systems
Defining the target group
Adults 18+ living with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia, or a personality disorder — currently in, or preparing to enter, a treatment process. They need better coordination, clearer information, and tools that support self-management between appointments.
Concept & Features
The core concept was consolidation with purpose: bring everything relevant to a person's treatment into one secure, accessible app — and design it to give users a genuine sense of agency, not just information.
We named the concept Origo — a fixed centre point — to signal that the user is at the heart of the experience, not the healthcare system.
The app covers ten core features:
Home — a personalised overview of the day, surfacing key information and reducing the need to navigate multiple sections
Inbox — secure messaging with care providers, reducing reliance on fragmented communication across different channels
Calendar — a unified view of appointments, medication reminders, and tasks, reducing the need to manage information across multiple systems
Daily check-in — a simple way to track mood and reflect over time, supporting self-awareness between appointments
Records — consolidated access to medical documents, reducing the need to search across different sources
Digital consultations — video calls with care providers, making it easier to keep appointments on days when attending in person feels difficult
Medication overview — tracking dosage and reminders, supporting consistency in daily treatment
Referrals — clear visibility into referral status, reducing uncertainty in the treatment process
Notifications — timely reminders and updates, helping users stay on top of appointments and medication without relying on memory
Support — easy access to help resources and support services, lowering the threshold for seeking help
Design Process
Designing for people managing serious mental health conditions set a clear bar for the visual and interaction design: calm, predictable, and navigable without unnecessary cognitive load.
We began with whiteboard sketches and wireframes to resolve information architecture before moving into Figma. The first clickable prototype was built to test structure and navigation — visual refinement came later, grounded in what we learned from testing.
Key design decisions:
A muted green palette as the primary colour, chosen to signal safety and calm rather than clinical sterility
Universal iconography paired with clear labels throughout, minimising ambiguity in navigation
Consistent layout patterns and reused components, so users never had to relearn how the app behaves
WCAG 2.1 compliance built in from the wireframe stage, not retrofitted at the end
Prototype & User Testing
We tested a clickable Figma prototype with five participants through structured tasks and follow-up interviews, recruiting specifically within the target group.
The calendar and daily check-in features received strong, consistent responses — both were described as immediately useful and intuitive. Navigation issues surfaced around the inbox's draft functionality, where the path wasn't clear enough.
Testing drove two full iteration cycles: revised icon choices, an adjusted navigation structure, and sharper interactive affordances in the flows that had caused friction.
Selected Screens
Below are some of the key screens from the final prototype.
Home
A personalised dashboard with today's key activities and shortcuts to the most relevant functions.
Calendar
Samler møter, medisiner og oppgaver i én strukturert oversikt. Brukeren kan velge dag-, uke- eller månedsvisning og få automatisk påminnelse om viktige hendelser.
Inbox
Notification
real-time updates on appointments, messages, records, and referrals, all in one place.
What I Learned
Designing for a vulnerable user group requires a different standard of care than most projects. Every ambiguity in the interface — an unclear label, an unexpected navigation pattern, an inconsistent interaction — carries more weight when your users may already be managing significant cognitive and emotional load.
This project sharpened my instinct for designing with constraint as a feature rather than a limitation. The most important decisions weren't about what to add — they were about what to simplify, what to make predictable, and what to never make the user think about twice.