Hearing stories

While I was already familiar with the challenging environment of being a student, I sent out a survey to 15 participants and conducted 3 interviews within my personal network to get a clearer picture of how students across different schools, majors, and demographics are managing their mental health.

Survey insights

After hearing personal stories in my user interviews and gathering some quantitative data from my survey, I started to have a good idea of what challenges looked like for students and what held them back from seeking support. To begin framing my focus on critical problems, I synthesized the results I collected so far, boiling down my Google forms survey and extracting the most impactful and surprising data points.

Affinity mapping

With an extensive data set from several research inputs, I needed some way to categorize and relate pain points. I turned to affinity mapping as a strategy since it is a natural way to group problems commonly faced. I developed three categories and then placed each pain point inside one of them.

Creating Julia, a user persona

To act as a reference point throughout my process and help potential stakeholders empathize, I developed a multifaceted user persona. Julia is similar to a lot of college students that suffer from anxiety and mental health issues. She isn’t fully aware of the level at which anxiety affects her day-to-day, and the anxiety symptoms she is aware of, she is resistant to seek support for.

Establishing core features

By combining all the challenges of Julia, our user, and my research insights, I was able to frame these data points into “how might we” questions. These questions will serve as the core focus as I continue onto ideation, and their solutions will help define the main functionality and feature set.

How might we…?

Designing the first prototype

After a thorough exploration process with wireframes, I started to upgrade them into higher fidelity mockups. Taking special care to make sure the visual elements across the app and its interface would remain approachable and feel like a safe and positive space. Eventually, I developed all of the app’s core functionality and then used Figma’s prototyping features to turn it into a navigatable concept.

Conducting testing

With a functioning prototype, I wrote a user testing script and conducted usability testing to get an understanding of what difficulties existed when it came to interacting with the app currently and what I could do to fix them. I learned about small unintuitive quirks, as well as ways I could strengthen a user’s emotional connection and trust in the app.

Promoting mindfulness

Mindfulness is proven to reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. By encouraging our users to complete a brief but complete mental check in daily, I can help my users become more aware of how they are feeling and possibly feel better.

Tracking mental health

Apart from giving users more awareness regarding their mental health, one of the goals of Oasis was also to provide support. Providing detailed recaps of days makes Oasis a useful companion for students that currently see a therapist.

Meditation made easy

From my research, I concluded that a key reason students shy away from seeking support is that they want to handle their mental issues on their own. Meditation is a great gateway to open resistant individuals to the idea of seeking support.

Reflection

While the normal user experience process is based on empathy for users, working on a mental health based project only increased the amount of care and attention that needs to be brought to understanding the struggles and pain points commonly faced by students. During this project, I learned how there will always be several answers to a problem, and that part of my job as a user experience designer is to think through and test specific solutions to help me make informed decisions about what is the best solution.

Since this project was completed in about 2 weeks I also ran into a lot of time constraints. There were several times where I wanted to spend more time on a subset of research, or visual element, but knew that I needed to continue to move forward on the project. There were also times where I invested a large amount of time into less than crucial elements of the app. In the future, I will want to keep working on my ability to successfully prioritize what I spend time on so that I do not fall behind in my process, while at the same time continuing to keep a balance of allowing creativity in its unpredictable nature to occur.

Next Steps

See the full Oasis story.