DRK – Digital Mental Health Service for Young Adults

DRK – Designing a Digital Mental Health Service for Young Adults in a School Context

How we co-created a low-threshold digital support channel with students, counselors, and stakeholders to address mental health challenges in schools during and beyond the pandemic.

Role and team

Sprint Master (Me), UX Design, Product Owner, 2 School health service managers, 2 Local school health supportes, 4 Young adults

Methods

Design Thinking

User Interviews

User Journey Mapping

Task Analysis

Flowchart

Wireflow

Prototyping

User Tests

Timeline

2022 – 10 Days

Tool Kit

Miro

Paper & Pencil

Figma

Whiteboads

Challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented mental health challenges for students. School social workers services were overwhelmed by increased demand while students faced isolation, remote learning difficulties, and heightened psychological stress. Traditional support systems were reaching their breaking points.

Additionally, we needed to navigate sensitive questions around student privacy, authentication, peer-to-peer support safety, and brand perception in the context of the trusted German Red Cross organization.

The core challenge: How might we create a digital mental health service that complements existing school support, maintains trust and safety, while remaining accessible and low-threshold for young adults who may be asking for help for the first time?

Design Sprint

As Sprint Master, I facilitated a 5-day intensive Design Sprint that brought together diverse stakeholders – from social work managers to the young adults themselves. This wasn’t just about designing an app; it was about co-creating a service ecosystem that bridges digital and physical touchpoints.

Key questions we tackled:

How do we authenticate students while maintaining anonymity?
Should we use chatbots for first contact?
Can peer-to-peer counseling coexist with the professional standards expected from the German Red Cross brand?

1. Discover & Empathize

Conducted contextual research including legal analysis, moderated stakeholder discussions, and in-depth interviews with students in safe spaces. Identified barriers, pain points, and emotional needs through affinity mapping and problem clustering.

What Problems Exist?
Which Problems Matter Most?
What are the Stakeholders Perspektives
Mapping of Barriers

2. Define

Synthesized insights into a clear design hypothesis. Prioritized problems through democratic voting with participants. Mapped the „hurdles hierarchy“ to identify technical vs. mental barriers in the help-seeking journey.

3. Ideate

Facilitated collaborative ideation using „How Might We“ questions along the healthcare user journey. Applied Crazy 8 method to rapidly sketch multiple solution concepts. Explored service touchpoints from digital to face-to-face.

4. Prototype & Test

Built interactive prototypes to test critical user flows. Conducted usability testing with young adults to validate assumptions about anonymity, peer support, and service accessibility. Iterated based on feedback.

Sprint planning

A design sprint thrives on focused intensity and collaborative momentum. As Sprint Master, I structured 10 days of activities to balance deep research with rapid prototyping, ensuring all voices – especially the young adults – were heard and valued.

Strict time management prevented analysis paralysis while creating space for unexpected insights to emerge organically from the diverse team.

Understanding the Problems

Legal Preconditions

Young adults are obliged to go to school and the school staff are obliged to supervise the young adults during school hours and while they stay on the school ground.

1 What Problems Exist?

Through moderated workshops, we collected individual problem statements from students, counselors, and health managers.

Grouping them by content revealed recurring themes – not just how often problems occurred, but the emotional weight behind each concern. Key insight: Frequency doesn’t equal severity. Some rarely mentioned problems carried intense emotional significance for individual students.

2 Which Problems Matter Most?

We employed democratic prioritization: each participant received three votes to identify their worst problems. This shifted our perspective dramatically – problems that seemed minor in frequency became critical when viewed through individual experience.

Top priority: The fear of judgment and lack of anonymity emerged as the primary barrier, even above accessibility or service hours.

3 Stakeholder Perspektives

While young adults were our primary focus group, we also surveyed broader student populations and isolated specific insights from each stakeholder group. This revealed tensions between what adults thought students needed versus what students actually wanted.

Although there were the same number of social workers and their area managers as there were young people present, the young people awarded fewer points because, among other things, they were initially unsure and first observed how it worked.

Critical finding: Young adults prioritized data protection and youth media channel integration; the social workers anonymous contact. The service needed to bridge both worlds.

Why Are There Fundamental Differences In The Perspectives?

100% Anonymity And Data Protection Are Impossible In A State Welfare Context

School social workers must be able to revoke the initially anonymous access to the service if the student proves to be a danger to themselves or others, in order to initiate appropriate measures, which they are obliged to do.

The Integration Of Popular Youth Channels Into The Media Is Contrary To Teaching Interests

Although one should meet people where they are, it is known that the intensive use of social media channels does not have a good effect on the development of young people, especially their ability to concentrate.

4 Mapping Barriers: The Hurdles Hierarchie

Because a low-threshold offer was one of the main goals, possible thresholds on the way to an acceptable offer were listed and again provided with problem statements. The service is designed to ensure that the initial technical hurdles eliminate the mental and organizational hurdles or make them easier to overcome.

Ideate

Healthcare User Journey

We brainstormed ideas on how to improve the support and consultation process along the healthcare user journey by asking the group „How can we …“ solve what problem in what phase or step along the journey, from help-seeking till face-to-face support.

Impact

This design sprint became the foundation for realtalk.help, a live mental health service launched by the German Red Cross serving students across Germany.

Strategic Branding Decision: Creating „Real Talk“ as a sub-brand was crucial. Our research showed that young people need psychological distance from crisis-branded services. An approachable name like „Real Talk“ signals peer support and normalcy – not emergency intervention. This dramatically lowers the barrier for first-time help-seekers who may feel their problems „aren’t serious enough“ for the Red Cross.

Peer-to-Peer Innovation: Enabling trained student peer counselors to provide initial support proved transformational. Young adults who receive help can later become helpers and therefore multiplicators of the help offer, creating a sustainable support ecosystem grounded in lived experience. This addresses both the capacity problem (overwhelmed counselors) and the trust problem (relatable peers reduce stigma)

GO TO PORTAL

Learnings

Reflecting on this intensive co-creative process, three insights fundamentally shifted how I approach service design for vulnerable populations:

1. Design WITH, Not FOR

It’s crucial to adapt solutions to the target group, not force users into predetermined ideas. Including young adults as equal co-creators – not just research subjects – generated insights no adult stakeholder could have imagined. Their emotional needs must drive the design, not our assumptions about what they „should“ want.

Next time: I would involve even more diverse student voices earlier, including those with direct lived experience of mental health challenges.

2. Question Your Assumptions

Target groups are rarely who we think they are. Conducting this workshop without extensive quantitative data was challenging but liberating – it forced us to stay humble and truly listen. What adults thought students needed (professional counseling, structured programs) differed dramatically from what students wanted (peer understanding, low judgment, flexible access).

Next time: I would combine qualitative workshops with broader surveys to validate assumptions at scale while maintaining depth of understanding.

3. Emotion Trumps Function

For sensitive services like mental health support, emotional design is more critical than functional design. Features that reduce shame, fear, and stigma matter more than technical sophistication. The feeling of safety, anonymity, and being understood creates the foundation – only then do functional capabilities matter.

Next time: I would integrate emotional journey mapping even earlier in the discovery phase, before jumping to functional requirements.

This project reinforced my belief that the most impactful service design happens at the intersection of empathy, co-creation, and strategic systems thinking. When we truly center users – especially vulnerable ones – and design services that honor their emotional realities, we create solutions that don’t just work, but genuinely help.

If i could do it again: I might not choose the design sprint format, as the speed and tight timeframe initially overwhelmed the younger participants. A longer preparation phase and a workshop on the workshop format and prerequisites would have been more appropriate for the topic.