Buddy's Quest

Company

TryCycle Data Systems

Role

Design Lead

Brief

Buddy’s Quest is a digital mental wellness tool that supports children through playful self-reflection and guided conversation. As Design Lead at TryCycle, I created an educator-facing dashboard that visualizes mental health data from the game.
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The challenge: balancing a serious design system with the emotional tone of childhood wellness, all while meeting the practical needs of busy educators. We rebuilt key components for clarity, warmth, and accessibility—making responsive design a foundation, not an afterthought.

This diagram breaks down the full journey of a mental health risk alert—from detection to resolution. The top row captures the primary flow, outlining the core screens and decisions made by a staff member. Below, we’ve included edge cases and potential errors identified during collaborative workshops, helping us design for real-world complexity—like multiple alerts, simultaneous responders, and filtering challenges.

Here, we translated the wireframes into high-fidelity designs using a structured design system. These screens reflect the final UI, with emphasis on clarity, accessibility, and user confidence. Each step includes intentional content, feedback states, and UI patterns that reflect the values we uncovered in workshops—like autonomy, transparency, and collaboration.

This project asked us to design not just for usability, but for care. By working closely with educators and healthcare providers, we built a system that supports timely, thoughtful responses to mental health risk—without overwhelming users or undermining trust.
The result is a tool that reflects the complexity of real-world care, and the quiet strength of good design.