Nuna the Cognitive-Behavioral AI ChatBot

Role: Product Design and AI Information Architecture consultant

Branding/colors/iconography/ Illustrations/ Design system: Provided by the design team @Kring

What is Nuna?

Nuna is an AI chatbot that teaches people about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to coach themselves. The goal of Nuna is to make mental education and care accessible to anyone.

My role was to assess the usability of the Nuna app and provide guidance on improving its information architecture and usability for its MVP release. The UX and information architecture improvements in this case study will be released in the Nuna IOS App the week of August 16th, 2021.

Chatbot UX Architecture Assessment

Problem: Teaching people about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) through a chatbot can be tedious. Because Nuna is still learning on average, it takes over 15 minutes for a user to identify a cognitive-behavioral thought pattern chat. Over 67% of users abandon the chat before identifying a thought pattern.

"As a user, I want to easily understand cognitive behavioral thought patterns so I can focus on my coaching session with Nuna."

Success Metrics / Desired Outcomes: Time to identify CBT thought pattern, decrease chat abandonment (bounce), improve customer satisfaction, and IOS app store rating

Example of previous experience: There are ten types of Cognitive Distortions Identified in CBT. In this example, I go through two examples with Nuna. Because Nuna is still learning, this exchange can continue for all ten scenarios.

Chat UX Improvements

By incorporating cards, users can focus on finding the learning content that resonates with them instead of engaging back and forth with Nuna.

By setting up tagging and analytics within the card components, Nuna will still learn to connect emotions to CBT exercises. As Nuna becomes more intelligent, it will make more precise recommendations based on user inputs instead of showing all exercises at once within the carousel.

Navigation and home screen assessment

Home screen Problems: Nuna does not have a home screen. Users cannot track their progress or choose which cognitive-behavioral exercise they would like to work on with Nuna without engaging in a back and forth chat with Nuna, which can take several minutes. It is not apparent to the user what exercises are available on the skill tree because currently, the app does not show them.

"As a user, I want to track the progress of my mental health journey so that I can understand what exercises I need to work on to improve my mental health.”

"As a user, I want to have the ability to choose which exercise I go back to and when I work on them because some exercises have helped me more than others, and my mood can change from the last time I used the app"

Navigation Problems: To do any task with the app, the user must navigate to the menu in the upper left hand of the screen, making it difficult for the user to move between features and hiding popular product features such as the gratitude journal. 

When looking at UX best practices or similar applications such as Bloom, Headspace, Calm, or even popular learning apps such as Duo Lingo, there is a bottom tab on the app to quickly move between the most-used features.

The bottom tab is such a typical UX pattern seen in most mobile apps ranging from retail, social media, entertainment to messaging apps (to name a few).

Success Metrics / Desired Outcomes: Increase engagement with tools and gratitude journal, decrease time to discover gratitude journal and tools, increase the number of paid subscribers, improve customer satisfaction, and IOS app store rating

Example of previous experience: The Navigation issues and lack of a home screen are intertwined problems. There is no guidance for returning users on what actions they can take next, and desirable features are hidden in the menu. All navigation has to be done through Nuna, which requires the user to know already what they want to do. Nuna's starting conversation is always, "how are you feeling today?" but this prevents the user from easily going back to a previous exercise or the gratitude journal without knowing how to navigate within the chat, which can quickly become cumbersome (the same problem identified in the earlier chatbot assessment).

Home screen and Navigation Improvements

Returning users are now greeted with a dialogue that asks them if they would like to continue working on the exercise they were previously engaged in. The user can either choose if they would like to continue where they left off or select "no thanks" they are taken to the home screen, where they can choose to engage with any available features. 

A home screen is added to the user flow, that acts as a hub for users to learn about the app features such as mood tracking, the gratitude journal, premium features, etc., can help the user understand the value of the paid product and help find features that best suit their personalized needs.

The home screen is also a place to integrate tracking features to understand where they are with their mental health journal. Understanding your own emotions is a crucial part of CBT and helps the user to know where they are making progress and where they have areas they need to continue to focus on.

The menu remains in the upper left-hand corner of the home screen, but the menu has been removed and replaced with a back button on deep page screens to navigate back from chat to home or the toolbox screen quickly.

The tools page (skill tree) now has its own dashboard accessible from the home screen and bottom navigational tab bar. A skill tree or dashboard can help the user see their progression. This is a standard practice among learning and mental apps such as Duo Lingo, Headspace, Calm, and even fitness apps like Fitbit or Apple health.

The new dashboard is called "your toolbox" and now displays progress indicators for each exercise the user has worked on and a locked icon for the tools they have not progressed to yet. Showing locked and unlocked exercises can help users track their progress and show what exercises they need to work on next. Showing locked features and or exercises also helps drive the value proposition for future paid app versions.

Full return-user flow with navigation and home screen improvements

The ToolBox skill tree screen and the homepage dashboard give the user greater freedom to choose which unlocked exercise and features they want to engage with. For some users going back to specific exercises even after they have been completed could be beneficial. At the same time, other users may receive the most benefit from gratitude journals and emotional check-ins with Nuna.

The primary purpose of this redesign is to give the users the freedom to personalize their mental health journey by giving them easy access to find the features that most resonate with them. It is not safe to assume that all users will engage in the product the same way.

It should also be noted that Nuna is still in an early phase of development, and there's still a lot to learn about how people will engage with the app. By giving users this freedom to personalize their experience, the Nuna team can better understand how the product can be most helpful to real users and help them to craft business cases for future investment.