MindSpace

01Background

Stress, anxiety, and depression among students are common but rarely measured early, because the available entry points ask too much: a clinical appointment carries stigma and friction, while informal online quizzes carry no validity at all. The gap is a first step that is both easy to take and worth trusting.

02Problem

Self-assessment in mental health is worthless if the instrument isn't trustworthy. A screening tool that produces a number nobody can defend is worse than no tool: it either falsely reassures or needlessly alarms. The design problem was therefore not the questionnaire's interface first — it was which questions may be asked at all.

03Instrument & approach

The assessment was built on DASS-21, a validated clinical instrument, rather than custom questions. Its 21 items map to three subscales — depression, anxiety, and stress — which gives every result a defensible basis and gives the interface a structure it did not have to invent.

The design work then followed the research: framing what the assessment may and may not tell a student, selecting the instrument, and shaping an assessment experience around its structure — research first, insight, then the assessment itself, then the experience carrying it.

Instrument

DASS-21 — validated clinical instrument

Structure

21 items → three subscales: depression · anxiety · stress

Role

Product Designer & Researcher

04Design & product implications

Instrument-first design inverts the usual order: the questionnaire's clinical structure decides the flow, and the interface's job is to carry it without distortion — no gamified scores, no reworded items, no invented severity labels. What the product may claim is bounded by what the instrument can support.

That boundary is itself the product thinking: a screening experience earns trust by being explicit about what it is not — a diagnosis — and by pointing beyond itself when the result warrants it.

05Publication

The research was accepted and published in the university repository. The published record is the canonical source for the full text, formal title, and bibliographic details; this page is the portfolio's account of the design work inside it.