We spoke with Dr A. Jess Williams, Lecturer in Suicide Prevention at Swansea University, about her reflections on the recent early career researcher workshop hosted by DATAMIND UK and MQ Mental Health Research: From Idea to App: Design, Develop and Deploy Mental Health Tech. The event brought together early career researchers, developers, industry leads and mental health researchers to explore what it really takes to turn research ideas into working digital tools.
Jess shared her thoughts on the practical challenges of moving from co-design to technical development, the importance of shared language across disciplines, and why meaningful patient and public involvement should sit at the heart of developing digital mental health interventions:
- What interested you most about attending this workshop, and what were you hoping to take away from the day?
In my previous role, I worked in a Computer Science department where I gained experience co‑designing digital interventions. Through this work, I became involved in app design, which sparked my curiosity about what actually happens next – how co‑designed ideas are turned into fully developed digital interventions in practice. In my role, I did all the co-design and then handed over to a software engineer, which felt abrupt! It made me reflect on the practical and methodological steps involved in moving from co‑design into technical development.
As digital intervention design and delivery is an area of research I’m really keen to build on, I was hoping this workshop would offer some concrete examples of how others have approached this process, what they’ve learned along the way, and potentially provide opportunities to connect with people I could ask questions of in the future.
- Was there anything that surprised you about the process of turning a research idea into a digital mental health tool?
I wouldn’t say I was surprised exactly, but I was once again struck by the language gap between different fields. In my experience, areas like computer science, implementation science, and psychology often use similar terms, but they don’t always mean the same thing by them. For example, “co‑design” in psychology often refers to work done with patient and public involvement groups, whereas in computer science and implementation science it’s more clearly defined as a methodological approach carried out with consented participants.
What I really appreciated about the workshop was gaining a clearer understanding of task‑level language that I could map onto specific methods. In my own work, I’ve run various activities and tasks within co‑design workshops that clearly contribute to intervention design, but I haven’t always had the right terminology to describe them. Having shared language to name these activities feels incredibly useful, particularly for communicating my work more clearly and confidently across different disciplines.
- A big theme of the workshop was co-design with users. How does that resonate with your own work on developing interventions for mental health?
Much of my work focuses on using co‑design methodologies with users – working closely with people who have lived experience of mental health difficulties and self‑harm to develop digital interventions that genuinely reflect their needs, priorities, and everyday realities. Seeing co‑design treated not as a box‑ticking exercise, but as a meaningful and valued methodology throughout the workshop, really resonated with me.
I found it both validating and inspiring to hear how others, often working within much larger multidisciplinary teams, are embedding co‑design at different scales and stages of intervention development. It reinforced the value of the relational (and sometimes messy) aspects of co‑design, which can be difficult to capture but are so important in mental health research. The workshop also encouraged me to reflect on how similar principles are being applied in different contexts, giving me confidence in the approach I’m taking and ideas for how my own work might evolve as interventions move from design into implementation.
- What’s one key idea or lesson from the day that you think early career researchers should know about?
During the workshop, we were introduced to VoiceAI, a digital platform designed to support patient and public involvement (PPI) in research. It was jokingly described as “PPI Tinder”. In essence, PPI contributors can swipe through research projects and offer feedback in response to set questions. I found this really exciting – it feels like a simple but powerful way to enable earlier and more accessible engagement with the public in the research process, and I can see it having some real benefits for both researchers and contributors alike.
For me, the key lesson of the day was that both patient and public involvement (PPI) and co‑design are fundamental to intervention development. For early career researchers, understanding the importance of each, how to engage meaningfully with both, and how their roles and definitions can differ across disciplines feels particularly important.
Looking ahead, our next Early Career Researcher workshop with MQ Mental Health Research will take place as part of the Mental Health Platform Research Summit on Friday 9 October in Sheffield – sign up now
