PsychLine
Team of friends
Development of an anonymous platform for people with mental health issues to come together and connect
January 2021 - April 2021
This project is a business plan and website build project for a business pitch competition. A team of friends and I identified a societal issue, build a business plan to solve this issue, and build a website design as a medium.
Background
According to the CDC, nearly 40% of adults struggled with mental health or substance abuse in June 2020. That said, my good friends, Kade, Noah, Micah, and Kevin, and I came together to develop a way to combat poor mental health. We created the concept of a free, anonymous platform for people with mental health issues to come together and connect. This was aimed to help ease the anxiety of people who are afraid to take the first step toward healing. It would also create a positive community of help, advice, and assistance between members.
There is a website called The Tribe, which also connects people with like mental health strugglers. However, we identified that their system was complex and noisy. Customers had the choice of picking which mental health ‘tribe’ they would be in. We are aiming to create a simpler system, one that will appeal to an audience that prefers a humbler, easy experience. It will also connect the customer to a community automatically instead of making the customer choose.
This concept came together as an application for the Summer Founders Program through Invent Penn State. The Summer Founders program gives startups, with at least one Penn State student founder, a $15,000 grant to work on their startup, social good, or non-profit idea over the summer. If awarded, the money would go towards our team working on the website on a full-time basis over the summer of 2021.
My Involvement
Team members Kevin, Noah, and Kade wrote code to build the website by hand using React, Material-UI, HTML, and CSS. I was not familiar with the heavy implementation of such programs, so I took over the business and design operations of the project.
The business operations of the website were considered by the team, but I oversaw putting them into words for personal records and the application.
Given the title of ‘Chief of Design’, I was responsible for the design of the logo and concept art for the website page.
My initial logo designs included wires between the two halves of the brain and a concept of a brain with a cord sticking out of it. These designs, created to be simple and friendly, were aimed at representing the connection of the brain (and the related mental health conditions we wanted to help heal) to the internet. However, the design evolved into a simpler version where no cords are used. The final logo design includes a regular, cartoony picture of a brain. The colors of the logo are the main colors that the programmers wanted to have for the website. The logo can be seen at the top of the page.
My concept art provided a frame of reference that allowed the programming to go smoother. I made a to-scale version of the landing page. You may view it below.
I used Photoshop to create both images.
We finished an ‘off-the-wall version of the website and submitted the application. We were excited to have been able to complete the preliminary concepts for the business project, but we were not selected for funding. If we were selected, we planned on seeking a hosting platform to publish the website. Between May and August 2021, we planned on having released an alpha version of the website, got it a good amount of attention through social media, begin and complete the development of a mobile app, and gaining a user count of 1000.
Due to the lack of funding, finals, and scattered summer plans between the group, we have decided to put the project on the shelf for now. We may consider picking up the website again for further development in the future.
Links
PSU Summer Founders Program website: https://invent.psu.edu/programs/summer-founders-program/