How Smiling Mind is creating generational change in mental health

Smiling Mind is a not for profit, who has been at the forefront of mental well-being innovation for over 10 years and has impacted millions of people globally, helping them to thrive with evidence-based tools and resources.

To date, the Smiling Mind mobile app has been downloaded 9 million times and has been a cornerstone for many users to build a consistent meditation practice. However, evidence suggests that incorporating broader mental fitness skills – that is, training to strengthen your mind by enhancing your resilience and helping you form good thought, language and emotional habits – can significantly enhance overall well-being. 

Due to the success of its original app and driven by the mission of creating lifelong mental fitness, Smiling Mind sought to modernise the app, introducing a fresh user experience with new features and content helping users achieve next-level mental wellbeing goals. 

The challenge for the not-for-profit was achieving all of this within their means, and with a small development and operations team already stretched, they needed to leverage technology to achieve scale.

Smiling Mind needed a partner who could help them realise the vision, from concept through to reality. Smiling Mind selected MakerX due to the deep understanding of the not-for-profit’s aspirations and business constraints, with highly collaborative execution and a laser focus on business outcomes. MakerX sought to ensure that Smiling Mind's development and operational teams had technology that could adapt to growth and change, allowing them to focus on delivering engaging and impactful content rather than managing complex systems. 

Smiling Mind’s Product Manager, Shaun Douglas, noted, "MakerX demonstrated a deep consideration for our people and the constraints of the organisation. They articulated a vision where our technology would support the growth and change needed to provide ongoing content and tools that help generate meaningful outcomes for our users.”

This collaboration ensured a smooth transition post-project so that Shaun and the team could continue the app’s development independently.

One of the challenges that emerged during the app delivery process was managing the range of subscription products that had increased system and operational complexity over time. MakerX addressed this by incorporating highly optimised content management and delivery capabilities with an adaptive user experience across both native mobile and web applications. This flexibility drastically reduced the effort needed to manage content across subscriptions and made it easy for Smiling Mind to generate entirely new content experiences. This approach means that the app can grow with the needs of users without the requirement to scale the organisation.

“MakerX took the time to understand the challenges we face and ensured they leveraged a core set of platforms to facilitate them all,” Shaun noted. “This was a demonstration of their focus to both deliver a great user experience and to resist the temptation to introduce unnecessary complexity.”

During user research, Smiling Mind learned that users often engage with the app habitually, using the same content at the same time each day. The research provided “both an opportunity and a challenge”, encouraging the team to ask, ‘How might the app help users establish habits, while also encouraging exploration of holistic mental fitness content?’

This insight led the team to create a feature that helps users establish and maintain habits while encouraging the exploration of holistic mental fitness content. With the new feature, 'Routine', users can add content to their own daily routines and receive notification reminders to complete them. Additionally, users are recommended new content based on their interests, goals and lifestyles. 

“By integrating into users' lives rather than interrupting them, we believe this will result in long-term engagement,” remarked Shaun.

The enhanced app supports Smiling Mind's mission of creating lifelong mental fitness by providing tools and content for users to build mental fitness all within a single app. This streamlined approach allows Smiling Mind to focus on impactful features and content, reducing costs and time associated with maintenance. 

Smiling Mind CEO, Sarah La Roche agrees “MakerX’s commitment to optimising for outcomes and ensuring our self-sufficiency has allowed us to focus on what truly matters: providing impactful mental wellbeing tools and resources to our users. Their collaborative approach and deep understanding of our mission have equipped us with the technology and knowledge to independently grow and evolve our offering.”

Jess Panni, Chief Product Officer at MakerX added, “Our collaboration with Smiling Mind exemplifies how thoughtful, user-centric app development can support a mission of profound societal impact. We are immensely proud to be a part of Smiling Mind’s journey.”

In the long term, Smiling Mind is inspired by the rise of generative AI in the mental health space, with Shaun adding, “There are many considerations, but the potential of personalising our content and experience to users based on their unique needs or ages, for example, could allow us to deliver even more impact.”