Transforming a decade-old mental health forum into a modern peer support platform
Outcomes
- +12 % Session time
- +93 % Performance
Good Design Awards 2025 Gold winner
Winning a Gold Award in the Digital Design category is a testament to the quality, impact, and innovation demonstrated by the SANE Recovery Community platform.
Overview
In 2014 SANE launched its forums to create a community to support Australians living with complex mental health needs. It's since seen incredible growth with over 40,000 members and over a million posts. Ten years later in 2024, we partnered with SANE to reimagine the forums as the Recovery Club, a modern peer support platform to help the 5 million Australians living with complex mental health needs to connect with one another and get access to the latest support offered by the country's top Not For Profits.
The Challenge
The challenge was, how can SANE expand its existing service to help other NFP’s utilize the forums to 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 existing user needs and preserve the community's established culture
- Welcomed new user's and allowed them to easily find resources.
- Expanded functionality to give other NFP’s more capabilities to enhance their services.
- Modernised the solution to be more accessible, user friendly and responsive.
Key Features
Improved Navigation
We made getting around the site straight forward. No need to be a power user to know where to find what you need. Just 3 simple navigation concepts with nice clear signage.
Search
We made search a first class citizen. It's now embedded across the entire site, giving new user's the ability to find what they need quickly and enabling member's to find people in need that they can support.
Featured Posts
To help user's keep up to date with the latest news and events, we added a featured posts section to the home page.
Resources
Some user's need more than peer support. We've added a resources section to the site to help them find the help they need.
Spaces
Spaces allow user's to find their tribe. They can join a space to connect with others who have similar experiences and interests.
Impact
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.