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How can we promote mental health challenges faced by women refugees in Canada?
Project Type
Design Challenge -Sponsored by Sun Life
Role
Lead Product Designer & Project Manager
Duration
1 Day
Team
5 Business and Design Students
Project Overview
Bloomie is a mobile app designed to help women refugees in Canada access mental health care by overcoming cultural, language, and literacy barriers. The app offers personalized services, including a survey to tailor support, educational resources on mental health, and a service selection page to connect users with therapists based on language, gender, and focus. By providing accessible and culturally relevant care, Bloomie empowers refugee women to better understand and manage their mental health in a supportive environment.
Healing Through Connection <3
The Problem Space
Refugee women in Canada face significant challenges when it comes to mental health, often feeling invisible in the broader healthcare system. While Canada provides mental health services for its citizens, these women are held back by cultural stigma, language barriers, and limited understanding of the available support. Many have experienced trauma, poverty, and isolation, and without strong social networks or knowledge of how the Canadian system works, they struggle to access the care they need. Factors like uncertainty about their residency status, financial instability, and the difficulty of adapting to a new life in a foreign country only add to the weight they carry. As a result, these women often suffer in silence, unable to find the support and resources that would help them heal and thrive.
Goal
The purpose of the Bloomie project is to create a mobile application that empowers refugee women in Canada to easily access mental health services by overcoming cultural, language, and literacy barriers. By providing a platform that offers personalized support, educational resources, and access to culturally sensitive therapists, the app aims to make mental health care more accessible, reduce stigma, and improve the overall well-being of refugee women. Ultimately, Bloomie seeks to help these women navigate their mental health journey with confidence and comfort, supporting their integration into Canadian society and fostering a healthier, more resilient community.
Ideation Process
During the brainstorming sessions for Bloomie, I worked closely with a team of five business and design students to generate and explore ideas that would best address the mental health challenges faced by refugee women. Together, we shared and assessed our priorities for the app, evaluating each idea based on its relevance, feasibility, and potential impact. This collaborative approach allowed us to experiment with various concepts and determine the most effective strategies to create an accessible and culturally sensitive platform that meets the unique needs of our target audience.
As a team, we brainstormed potential ideas that could be included in the mobile application. I categorized these ideas into four distinct groups, each distinguished by colour coordination.
Research Process
UX Research
To design Bloomie, I conducted secondary research to understand the unique mental health challenges refugee women face in Canada. I analyzed reports on systemic barriers, including cultural stigma, language limitations, and literacy challenges, to identify key pain points. This research informed our design approach, ensuring the app prioritized accessibility and cultural relevance. By synthesizing insights from existing studies, I developed user personas and mapped out the user journey to tailor features like multilingual support, an education hub, and personalized service recommendations. Through this research-driven process, Bloomie was designed as an inclusive and user-friendly tool to connect refugee women with essential mental health support.
Through Bloomie, my team had narrowed down 3 key objectives that we wanted to target our application towards. The first is to reduce barriers to accessing mental health care. Specifically, culture barriers, language barriers, and literacy barriers. As many individuals from different backgrounds may stigmatize mental health and have different levels of education, many women refugees may not understand the ways of receiving mental health services that are provided in Canada. Or even simply understand what mental conditions they could be facing.
The second objective we want to focus on is connecting the at-risk groups with the support that they require. By providing these women refugees with an online platform to learn about mental health, and seek therapy services from therapists that either speak the same language or have a similar cultural background. That way, these women are comfortable with sharing their mental health journey in which they can receive support. This follows into our last point which is to increase accessibility
Design Process
Through our design process, we developed three distinct user flows to guide users through key tasks. These include: the login page, an educational page aimed at informing refugee women about various types of mental health disorders, and the appointment scheduling process, allowing users to book sessions with their preferred therapist.
🎤 Final Pitch Presentation
After 8 hours of hard work, it was finally time to pitch our idea to the panel of judges. I had the opportunity to represent my team and deliver our three-minute pitch.
🌟 Key Takeaways
1. Working Together, Different Minds, One Goal
Collaboration across business and design fields was essential. By combining our skills and perspectives, we were able to develop creative, well-rounded solutions. Clear communication and teamwork were key to staying aligned and tackling the challenge efficiently.
2. Designing with Empathy, Understanding Real Struggles
Empathy was critical in addressing the mental health challenges faced by refugee women. We had to understand the cultural, trauma-related, and systemic barriers to create solutions that truly resonated with their experiences.
3. Staying Flexible, Communicating, and Thinking Outside the Box
The competition taught us to stay adaptable and solution-focused under pressure. Clear communication kept the team motivated while thinking outside the box allowed us to come up with innovative, impactful ideas quickly.
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