Sane Recovery Community

Around 5 million Australians live with complex mental health needs, 500,000 of which are missing out on critical psychosocial support. SANE’s forums enabled peer to peer support to help close this gap. The challenge was, how can SANE expand its existing service to help other NFP’s utilize the forums to affordably enhance their services and give users more robust, specialised support? We would need to work with community members to rebuild the forums from the ground up in a way that met all their existing needs, whilst paving the way for other NFP’s to contribute.

We started by asking the experts, our community! Through surveys, interviews and co-design posts we were able to identify user needs and ideate on what NFP’s could provide to support our members. Users mentioned that it can be slow to get the answers they need and whilst SANE offered resources, they were largely unaware of them. Further research revealed users did find this content helpful, especially when endorsed by an expert. We built multiple, terribly rough prototypes, tested them with our community and ultimately sculpted a solution that both meets their existing needs and facilitates an extra channel of support.

The impact achieved by the redesign has been in opening the forums up to a wider audience and to aid them in finding additional help. Whilst we knew from interviews that the existing community were resistant to change, we also were aware that the previous forum was struggling to cater to new user’s needs, who would choose alternative platforms like Reddit for searches. For users that did sign up and post, they could be waiting hours for a reply and be stuck in a state of distress.

Mental health is extremely broad. Users need to be able to focus on the topics they are interested in and ignore content that is either not relevant or potentially distressing. Spaces are essentially subcommunities that provide this nuance and give partners a platform to engage with SANE’s community. Contextual resources allow for spaces to display links of both SANE and partner endorsed content that may help users on their recovery journey. Partners typically have access to recent developments in research and support programs which they are then able to pass on to the community. Enhanced search across the homepage and all spaces. We developed a more intuitive search that was embedded across the whole experience which is designed to enable new users to find help easily and empower existing users to find posts where they might be able to offer support. Spotlighted content to help highlight content that is important to users such as events and notifications.