Fika:
Designed for Crisis
Designing a mental health app for the moment when your hands are shaking, your thoughts are scattered, and you need help now — not after navigating through 15 features. Most mental health apps are designed for calm. Fika was not.
The Problem
Designed for the Wrong Moment
Imagine your heart is racing, your hands are shaking, and you cannot think straight. You open a mental health app and see 15 features: journal, mood tracker, breathing exercises, meditation library, crisis resources, community forum, therapist chat. Which one do you tap? If you are in a panic attack, the answer is: you cannot process that many choices. Your brain literally does not work the same way.
Most mental health apps are designed for people who are already calm enough to navigate complex interfaces. They fail at the exact moment someone needs help most — the first 30 seconds of a crisis.
"Design specifically for cognitive impairment, not cognitive clarity."
That was the core challenge for Fika. Not: how do we build a better mental health app. But: how do you design for a user whose ability to use your product is at its lowest exactly when they need it most?
Research
Three Interviews. One Critical Insight.
We conducted semi structured interviews with 3 college students (ages 18 to 22) who had self reported anxiety experiences. Our goal was to understand what people actually do during anxiety attacks — not what they think they should do — so we could design something they could realistically use in that state.
Cognitive load makes complex actions impossible. "My brain gets sidetracked... hands would be shaking." This directly shaped the design: large buttons, single action flows, no menus, no choices.
Privacy concerns about automatic alerts. "I might turn it off if people know I am anxious." Contact sharing had to be opt in, never automatic.
A secondary finding that became a hard constraint: iOS limits the number of local notifications an app can schedule. Any breathing or grounding feature that relied on timed alerts was architecturally bounded. This forced radical simplicity in how we structured exercises — which, as it turned out, was exactly the right constraint to have.
Design Decisions
The Constraint That Made Everything Better
The rule was simple: no feature more than 2 taps away from the home screen. This was not just a UX preference — it is backed by cognitive load research. When someone is in crisis, they cannot handle decision trees. Every extra tap is a chance they abandon the app entirely.
Large "I Need Help Now" button. Takes up 40% of the screen. Impossible to miss. Bright green, not red — red signals danger and could worsen anxiety. The touch target at 48 by 48 pixels exceeds WCAG AAA guidelines.
Guided breathing exercise. Research backed 4-7-8 pattern. Visual animated circle plus haptic feedback plus optional audio. The animated circle is easier to follow than text when you cannot focus on reading.
Low stimulation design. Neutral green palette, dark mode as default, no bright colors, minimal animations. One participant told us: "notifications make it worse." So we minimized all visual noise throughout the entire experience.
"Every feature we liked but could not reach in 2 taps got cut. That constraint made the app actually usable when it matters most."
Wireframes
Structure Before Style
Low fidelity wireframes focused on validating the information architecture. Could users reach the grounding exercise from a cold launch in under three taps? Could they find emergency contact options without any prior familiarity with the app? Testing confirmed the three tap rule worked for the grounding exercise, but emergency contacts were buried two levels deeper than they should have been — a finding that directly shaped the final information architecture.
Usability Testing
4 Participants. A Critical Failure We Almost Missed.
We tested with 4 participants (ages 18 to 22) to evaluate if the app could be used during high stress moments. Some tasks had time constraints to simulate urgency — which turned out to be essential.
The critical failure: the 4 second alert timeout. A location alert appeared during the breathing exercise but disappeared after 4 seconds. Three out of 4 participants missed it entirely. One participant said: "It went away before I knew what it was for or that it was there at all." During an actual anxiety attack, users would miss this crucial safety feature completely.
If 75% of users cannot interact with a critical safety feature during calm testing, it will be 100% failure during a real crisis. That number looked bad. It was bad — and it was the most valuable thing that came out of this project. Without the constrained task, we would have shipped a contact alert that fails exactly when it is needed most.
Four specific improvements followed from watching real users struggle. The location alert was changed to stay visible until the user actively accepts or dismisses it. Progress indicators were added to the breathing exercise with a countdown timer ("Hold: 5...4...3..."). A persistent "Emergency Mode Active" status indicator with a green dot was added. And the breathing reminder architecture was simplified to a single trigger model that respected the iOS notification limit.
Outcomes
What the 25% Taught Me
All participants located the primary grounding exercise in under 5 seconds from launch. But the 25% constraint success rate on the alert task was the finding that mattered most. Constraint based testing is essential for crisis state products. Testing "can you find the button?" is not enough. Testing "can you find it while stressed, distracted, and under time pressure?" reveals real failures.
The 2 tap constraint forced ruthless prioritization. Every feature we liked but could not reach in 2 taps was cut. That constraint made the app actually usable when it matters most.