AHADI

AHADI is the flagship product of the Tanzania Health and Medical Education Foundation (TAHMEF), and Tanzania’s first digital mental-healthcare facility. Its positioning is blunt about the problem it exists to solve: as the site itself puts it, one in four people experience a mental-health disorder at some point in their lives, yet stigma and lack of access keep most of them from ever reaching support.

Access is the harder half of that gap. Many people in the communities AHADI serves do not own a smartphone or have reliable internet, so a polished app on its own would quietly exclude the people who need help most. That context — not a feature list — is what the website had to carry.

AHADI’s answer to the access gap is a hybrid model, and the site’s first job was to make that model legible. Support comes four ways: the smartphone app on Google Play, a WhatsApp helpline, a USSD shortcode (*15061#) that works on any basic phone with no internet, and in-person counseling with licensed professionals. The service is offered to both individuals and corporates.

My goal as the site’s designer was to hold two things at once: explain that model plainly, and make the whole page feel calm and human enough that asking for help reads as an ordinary thing to do. Warmth and clarity were the brief; clinical polish was not.

Across the site I gave each page one clear job. The homepage opens with a plain welcome and the promise — “Your Path to Mental Wellness” — then shows the app in context, lays out the services, and answers “why AHADI” before ever pushing the download. The Services page carries the explaining: the Individual and Corporate paths up top, then the benefits and the hybrid model spelled out.

The most deliberate structural choice was giving the free self-help stress assessment its own prominent place. It offers something useful immediately — no account, no download, no cost — which matters for a first-time visitor who is unsure and may never come back. Value first, sign-up later.

Before any color or photography, each screen is a simple stack of blocks — the wireframes shown here alongside the finished designs. Working at that low fidelity keeps the structural thinking honest: lead with reassurance rather than a feature list, keep a generous single-column rhythm that holds up on a narrow phone, and let one idea land per section.

Two rules run through every layout. Surface the free assessment early, so help is never more than a scroll away. And hold to a single primary call to action — the green “Download AHADI” pill — so the page always has exactly one obvious next step instead of competing buttons.

The visual language does the emotional work. A soft blue-to-teal-to-green gradient runs under everything, rounded cards keep edges friendly, and a warm geometric sans keeps the tone approachable rather than institutional. Photography is specific and local — real African communities in conversation — so the site looks like it belongs to the people it serves.

Colour is disciplined on purpose. The palette stays cool and quiet so a single lime-green pill can own every primary action; nothing else competes for that role. I watched contrast against the gradient throughout, so headings and body copy stay legible over a moving background, and kept type large and spacing generous to keep the reading calm.

The assessment uses the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), a clinically validated fourteen-item instrument; each question offers the same five answers, from Never to Very Often. My work was the experience around it: one question per card, plenty of breathing room, and a steady rhythm so a long questionnaire never feels like an interrogation, ending in a single “Submit & See Results”.

The results screen is where tone matters most. A score becomes a plain-language band — “Low Stress” — followed by a calm explanation and concrete, culturally grounded self-help steps: exercise, diet, sleep, relaxation, and leaning on family and community. It points back to the app’s free tools rather than a paywall.

One decision was non-negotiable and worth naming: the safety disclaimer. The site is explicit that AHADI is not designed for emergencies or crises, and directs people to a local hospital or clinic for immediate help. Designing for mental health means being honest about what a website can and cannot do.

These four screens — homepage, services, the assessment, and its results — are a representative slice of the AHADI website, not the whole product. I’ve shown them here because together they carry the thing I care about in the work: making a mental-health service feel approachable and trustworthy at first glance.

From a visual and web design seat, the project was a lesson in restraint and responsibility — designing for access across very different devices and incomes, for cultural fit, and for the duty of care a mental-health product carries. Getting the calm right was the point.