Alonesy: Designing a Safe Space for Teens to Connect
A research-driven mobile app built to support teen mental health—creating a safe, approachable space for youth to connect with trained mentors. Designed in collaboration with a team of five, the experience balances emotional safety, visual clarity, and thoughtful guidance to help teens feel heard, respected, and supported.
Role
UX/UI Designer
Industry
Mental Health & Youth Mentorship
Duration
6 weeks
Discover
Comparative Analysis
To move efficiently, our team split into small groups to conduct a rapid competitor audit.
My Role: Partnered with Purvi to research and evaluate existing mental health and mentorship apps.
Goal: Identify common design patterns, usability issues, and gaps in the current landscape.
Outcome: Completed our analysis in one day and presented key findings to the full team to inform our design direction.
Key Takeaways from Comparative Analysis
Engagement through Interaction: Teens respond well to layered, immersive interactions. Varying levels of engagement help sustain interest and emotional connection.
Intentional Use of White Space: Clean layouts create breathing room for content, supporting more dynamic animations and reducing cognitive load.
Customizable Chat Backgrounds: Letting users personalize the chat interface (e.g., colors tied to mood) adds personality and emotional nuance.
Illustration as Branding: Thoughtful illustrations enhance visual storytelling and help create a warm, grounded environment for both mentors and mentees.
Transparency & Crisis Support: A clearly written FAQ—with direct CTAs for crisis help—can build trust and provide quick access to resources.
Supportive AI for Downtime: When mentors are unavailable, a human-like chatbot can offer comfort, engagement, and escalate issues to live support if needed.
User Interviews
To better understand how Alonesy's MVP was performing, we began with a round of surveys sent to both mentors and mentees.
Interviewed 4 mentors to gather in-depth qualitative insights.
Focused on understanding current usage patterns, pain points, and unmet needs.
These conversations helped shape our design priorities around trust, engagement, and emotional safety.
Transcribing the Data
After conducting the interviews, I transcribed the recordings using Otter.ai and organized key insights as digital sticky notes in FigJam to streamline the synthesis process.
Created labeled post-its to capture quotes, themes, and behaviors.
Scheduled a collaborative affinity diagramming session the next day to cluster patterns and identify emerging themes as a team.
Define
Affinity Diagramming Session
Our team held a focused 2-hour session to break down the qualitative data into thematic groups.
Clustered insights to reveal patterns in mentor feedback
Identified pain points, unmet needs, and opportunities
Used findings to guide our problem definition and design decisions
Key Takeaways from Interviews
Vague Onboarding: Current onboarding questions lack specificity, making it difficult to match mentees with the right mentors.
Mentor Support Gaps: Mentors expressed a need for greater visibility into their supervisor mentors within the app.
Peer Knowledge Sharing: A mentor-to-mentor chat feature could foster knowledge sharing and strengthen the support system.
Missing FAQs: Both mentors and mentees need easy access to a clear FAQ section—for general guidance and emergency resources.
Notification Bug: Unread message alerts disappear as soon as the app opens, even if the message hasn’t been viewed.
Login Issues: Mentees frequently experience being logged out and unable to sign back in.
Defining the Problem
Alonesy serves two core user groups:
Mentees (teen users seeking support)
Mentors (including supervisor mentors)
After organizing our research into user-specific themes, we began framing how might we questions to explore possible solutions—while grounding our ideas in empathy through user stories.
Understand
User Stories
Over two days, we created an ongoing list of user stories grounded in our research data.
This exercise deepened our empathy and directly informed our personas, user flows, and site maps.
Below is a small sample from our full list of user stories.
User Personas
Our team held a collaborative session to align on the direction of our personas.
To ensure each persona was grounded in both data and empathy, I also met one-on-one with team members to review insights and validate key traits, motivations, and pain points.
Design
User Flows
To maximize efficiency, our team initially worked on user flows individually. We then regrouped to align on the best path forward and define how those flows would inform our screen designs.
Below are a few of the user flow samples I created.
Low to High Fidelity Wireframes
Using the user flows as a foundation, I created low- to mid-fidelity wireframes to explore key screens and interactions—particularly around onboarding, sign-up, and mentor matching.
Sketched concepts helped me quickly test layout ideas and content hierarchy.
Mid-fidelity wireframes allowed me to validate functionality and refine form inputs, microcopy, and call-to-action placement.
Focus was placed on clarity, emotional tone, and minimizing friction—especially important for a teen audience seeking support.
Prototype
Once the screens were refined, I developed an interactive prototype to test with users and gather actionable feedback.
User testing allowed me to identify usability issues and iterate on layout, language, and flows.
This process is ongoing, as maintaining a successful app requires continual feedback and refinement.
Regular testing ensures the experience stays user-friendly, emotionally supportive, and aligned with real-world needs.
User Testing
After creating the first iteration of both the mid- and high-fidelity prototypes, I conducted usability tests to validate key interactions and gather feedback.
Recruited mentees and scheduled sessions via Calendly
Focused on clarity, ease of use, and emotional tone
The screenshot below is from one of the high-fidelity testing sessions
These early tests played a crucial role in surfacing pain points and opportunities for refinement—especially from the perspective of real teen users.
After creating the first iteration of both the mid- and high-fidelity prototypes, I conducted usability tests to validate key interactions and gather feedback.
Recruited mentees and scheduled sessions via Calendly
Focused on clarity, ease of use, and emotional tone
The screenshot below is from one of the high-fidelity testing sessions
These early tests played a crucial role in surfacing pain points and opportunities for refinement—especially from the perspective of real teen users.
Synthesizing Insights
Armed with qualitative data, I created a clear and actionable affinity map to organize key themes and pain points.
This helped surface potential solutions and made it easier to communicate design opportunities to key stakeholders.
Next Steps
I will continue collaborating with developers to ensure a smooth handoff of the prototype and design specifications, including spacing, typography, and interaction behaviors.
Looking ahead:
Conduct a second round of usability testing with both mentors and mentees
Monitor onboarding success rates and gather data on chat feature usage
Iterate on key flows based on live user feedback post-launch
Explore opportunities for adding mentor-to-mentor communication and mood-based customization
This case study taught me the value of designing for trust, emotional nuance, and simplicity—especially when building tools for vulnerable users like teens.