The Design Patterns for Mental Health library, in its current incarnation, has been around for over a year. Right now, it’s a light touch compendium of best practices on how to design products and services for mental health.
Starting the Design Patterns for Mental Health library
We first gave birth to it via a collaboration between Public Policy Lab and Snook. We then added Barnardos into the mix - with funding from Nominet - and focused on a series of patterns for digital products, young people and mental health.
We collaborated over the pandemic to research, test and release a working prototype of the patterns library. What you see online right now is a snapshot of the content we developed.
In 2021 we ran our first public co-design session where we brought people together to develop and submit patterns and see how public contribution might work in practice.
Since then, we recognise we’ve been a bit quiet until now.
Where we are today
The content that was submitted has gone into a backend database of patterns, insights and examples that all need to make their way onto the library at some point.
What we learned through our engagement is that there is a large and eager community out there working in the mental health design and delivery space who want to connect up and help us build content for the library.
We also learned that working at scale is difficult when managing a taxonomy of patterns and content for many reasons including repetition, assurance of evidence, ease of use.
Since then our Slack community has grown to just over 450 members. With our hands held up, we haven’t released or done much with the community recently.
We realised before doing anything more, we needed to consider how to make the library sustainable in the longer term and how to consider publishing material.
We’ve created a stewardship group
So, we made a stewardship group (working title). I know from experience that these kinds of projects are fragile unless there is a supportive group to steward the platform and content.
Our stewardship group is currently made up of people who answered a call out online and via our Slack community.
We meet every 6 weeks and set ourselves small goals as we are all doing this around our day jobs. Our focus over the next 6 months includes:
Defining the stewardship group governance
Undertaking user research to define further who our users are and what they need
Reviewing current use cases to date
Cleaning up the existing backend pattern library, removing content repetition and migrating it to a new storage drive
Defining a V2 of the library and developing a future roadmap which includes;
Functionality (e.g do we provide saveable patterns)
Content type and taxonomy (e.g do we provide content design examples / how do people navigate for content)
Process for publishing content
Our standards and processes for evidencing patterns/examples and transparently sharing this with users
6. Fundraising to allow us to develop the roadmap to commission the development of a future platform and taxonomy
7. Defining how the wider community can get involved and what events we’d like to hold
8. Finding a sustainable way for the pattern library to continue
What we want to do going forward
Address a diversity imbalance of the group by inviting people to join who have missing skills/knowledge/perspectives not currently in the group
Define how the stewardship group works with the wider community
Define how the stewardship group works
What to look out for
User research calls: In the next few weeks we’ll be making call outs for people to take part in user research if they are someone designing mental health products and services (designing could mean being a product owner, developer, service designer, UX…) or someone delivering mental health services in a live setting.
Expanding our stewardship group: We are currently defining how we bring members into the stewardship group, what membership looks like and how we cycle through members.
We are actively looking for members who are;
Black and Indigenous people of colour who have experience in designing mental health products/services or experience of using mental health services
People who have expertise in delivering mental health services
Academic experience that brings mental health service and delivery evidence / frameworks to the table.
You can join the wider community here or email us if you meet any of the criteria above and can spare a small amount of time monthly to join the stewardship group
We do recognise that this is a voluntary position and is not currently funded and may make it difficult for some people to join the stewardship group at this time.