Dr. K's Guide 2.0

Hey! Brandon here, Product Manager for Healthy Gamer, dropping in to give an introduction and overview to the exciting changes that have been released for Dr. K’s Guide to Mental Health!

For those who don’t know, the Guide’s visual structure was always intended to be a choose-your-own-adventure style grid that was heavily inspired by Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid. Over time, it has evolved from a spherical grid with 3 modules, to a hexagonal grid with 5 modules!

As such, we noticed two main issues for users: (1) newer users of the Guide who owned a majority of the modules were overwhelmed by the amount of paths and options they had and (2) the experience of navigating the grid had become increasingly difficult on screens of smaller size (ie: tablet & mobile devices). We set out to work on resolving these two issues for users through a combination of design, user interviews, and a closed beta for feedback - the result of which is what you see live today! It’s a huge step in the right direction of relieving the main issues we identified but, is by no means the end of the work we’ll be putting into the Guide.

To cover a bit more about the biggest changes, I’ll briefly address the reorganization of videos into more bite-sized “learning paths” and the design overhaul for mobile devices. With these learning paths, our goal was to help make it easier to understand what to watch, and learn more about a specific topic within a module. To further assist with this process, we created our first iteration of “Guide user profiles” and the associated guided experience through the content. Now as a new user to the Guide, you’ll be prompted with an (optional) survey that helps us understand your goals with the Guide - our backend then uses your responses to suggest videos and learning paths that help with your goals.

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As far as the mobile UI / UX improvements, we reorganized the interface into cards with added support for disability assistance & navigation. The learning paths should be more easily accessible through these cards and each module unlocks fully after watching the “Core Knowledge Path” which provides the baseline knowledge you’ll need to understand the rest of the content in the module.
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Don’t worry though, for those of you who enjoy the overview and style of the hexagonal grid—we will continue to support this version of the guide. There is a secondary link to the map view located in the sidebar menu.
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You can check out the new version of the Guide here.

Overall, I’m hoping the changes are a positive one for both new and returning users to the Guide. Our work certainly isn’t done but I’m glad that we’re able to share this big release with y’all as a first step in the overall direction of the Guides. If you guys have general feedback, comments, or suggestions feel free to post to Discord or Reddit - I’m usually lurking there 🙂

Thanks for your continued support and welcome to Dr. K’s Guide 2.0! 💚

-Brandon

Product Manager