Designing for people with anxiety: Supporting information acquisition, interpretation, and use through toolkit design

Date

2026-3

Author

Arık Özgürlük, Yağmur Merve

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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The growing integration of design into complex health and wellbeing contexts has increased the demand for comprehensive and multidimensional health-related information that can meaningfully inform design decisions. This need becomes particularly critical in the context of anxiety disorders, where designers must navigate a condition shaped by a complex nature, evolving influences, and deeply personal experiences. Designing for individuals living with anxiety requires more than general familiarity; it demands an understanding of its multifaceted and subjective characteristics and how these shape individual experiences. Yet, the ways in which designers access, engage with, and make sense of such information remain unclear. In response, this study explores how designers can be supported in acquiring, interpreting, and using anxiety-related health information when designing for individuals living with anxiety. The methodology was structured into two phases. Phase 1 focused on understanding key stakeholders, including designers, mental health professionals, and individuals living with anxiety disorders. This phase consisted of three stages: generative interviews with designers; expert interviews with mental health professionals; and narrative inquiry through directed storytelling sessions with individuals diagnosed with anxiety. Phase 2 examined how insights from Phase 1 could be translated into a structured guide, the Anxiety-Focused Information Toolkit for Designers (AFIT-D), using Card Sorting and Tree Testing to ensure alignment with designers’ mental models. The results highlight designers’ need for structured, adaptive, visually supported, and multilayered information that is comprehensive in scope and aligns with their design processes.

Subject Keywords

Designing for anxiety, Anxiety-focused information, Health information acquisition, Toolkit design for designers, Designing for mental health

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119073

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis