Oasis
Concept app for college students that encourages mindfulness and addresses stigmas around mental health.
Role:
UX Designer & Researcher
Client:
Passion Project
Team:
Individual
Timeline:
Jan 2021 (3 weeks)
Background
In 2019, NPR called it an “Epidemic”. Today with COVID-19 flipping the world upside down, mental health for college students has only gotten worse. As a college student myself, I encounter the widespread mental health struggles of my peers regularly. It’s not hard to see with an intense pressure to succeed academically, an uncertain future, and the general bumpy ride of young adulthood why so many college students find themselves anxious, depressed or facing other obstacles in their life.
Problem
Mental health struggles are increasingly widespread for college students while support remains underutilized.
Solution
An approachable app focused on providing support and removing the stigma around mental health issues.
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.
Secondary research
To extend my understanding even further and appreciate the scale of mental health issues, I engaged in research beyond the user interviews and survey I conducted myself. I took a look at a variety of sources relating to the rates of anxiety and depression among college-aged adults over time and the start of Covid-19, as well as how it affects their lives.
Combing my external research with the research that I conducted, I was able to fully empathize with the struggles of college students and the mental health challenges they face. In many ways, my eyes were opened, not only to the scale of mental health issues but to how each student was different.
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.
Findings: Why don’t students seek help?
Anxiety and depression are daily life-altering issues, yet many students don’t seek mental health support. Because there are proven and effective treatments out there, turning that around would be a great way to increase my app’s impact. To do that, I needed to understand what holds students back. Grouping pain points through affinity mapping provided four primary reasons students often end up suffering silently and provided a framework for combating the challenge of getting students to change their perspective.
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.
Symptom effort/impact matrix
To understand Julia at a deeper level, I needed to understand the strategies she already uses to manage her anxiety. I developed the chart below in which each action has a different level of effectiveness and a different level of effort.
User design constraints
To make the app less intimidating for Julia, I developed a list of five reservations when it comes to seeking support to allow me to design the app with them in mind. Three primary reasons emerged, as well as two other less impactful but still important reasons.
Competitive analysis
In order to build with lessons learned from other efforts directed at this problem, I downloaded 10 mental health apps and tested them to discover their shortcomings.
Testing insights
I found that some mental health apps are quite over-complicated and are likely intimidating to those who struggle with issues like anxiety or depression. Other apps are more approachable and encourage mindfulness and support but don't address the stigma that stops people from downloading mental health apps in the first place.
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…?
Ideation
1. Brainstorming
Using my “how might we” questions as a jumping-off point, I brainstormed different ideas for each of them and considered their feasibility.
In this session I concluded:
The app could warm up users to seeking help
Symptom tracking from check-ins would increase condition awareness
Using influencers/celebrities might be a powerful tool to remove the embarrassment students feel about symptoms
2. Crazy 8’s
With some ideas flowing from my brainstorm, I generated 8 quick but distinct functionality concepts. Doing them quickly allowed me to keep my mind open to out of the box ideas.
In this session I concluded:
There are many ways to track symptoms
Anonymous social media type interaction might be another tool to remove the fear of judgment
Success stories might help encourage students to act by increasing belief in change being possible
3. Feature prioritization
Transforming my crazy 8 ideas into more developed features and concepts, I generated a list of pros and cons for 4 core potential functionalities.
In this session I concluded:
Finding a complexity balance for symptom check-in/tracking will be important
Influencer engagement the way I picture it might be hard to produce at scale
Anonymous messaging might lead to harassment
4. Merging into a new direction
To properly choose a couple of ideas to expand on, I completed some new research. While researching, a variation based on a past idea entered my mind as a new idea.
In this session I concluded:
Influencer stories would be just as impactful to students as real engagement
Even when seeing a therapist, tracking symptoms would be helpful for weekly overviews
A balance of meditation lengths will make them accessible
Information architecture
With core features set and sketches illustrating how major functionality would flow, I then zoomed out to decide the overall layout of the app. Connecting together the ideas from the previous stages I created a hierarchy of information based on what would be most valuable to the user and Julia, my persona. This allowed me to design in the most user-friendly way.
Iterative Wireflows
With sketches and the information architecture developed, I started creating and iterating with wireframe designs. For each sketch and core functionality, I designed several versions with differing layouts, information hierarchy, and navigation. I then conceptualized criteria to better help me make choices on trade-offs when it comes to picking one design over another.
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.
Iterating from user feedback
Using what I learned from my user testing sessions, I started iterating on various features and flows of the app. From just a couple of sessions, I was able to gain invaluable insights into what my users liked and didn’t like about the Oasis experience, as well as what felt natural and what felt confusing usability wise.
Problem: User’s struggle to read their emotions
A subject commented that during the check-in flow, that they loved that emojis were displayed next to the text label of each emotion because it allowed them to feel more connected with their own emotions and reflect on their own mood with less effort. With this knowledge, I decided to implement emojis into other aspects of the app, like in the recap cards seen on the dashboard screen.
Solution: Adding emojis to recap cards
Stories exploration
As a part of my continuous iteration, I worked on the influencer story features of the app. While what I came up with didn't end up being a more robust or delightful design than what I already had, it was still a valuable design exploration and provided awareness I would later use relating to other aspects of the app.
Accessibility considerations
I thought it was essential to conduct brief research and then formulate a couple of visual modifications to make Oasis more accessible. In the round highlighted below, I focused on making the dashboard page work better for users with visual impairments.
Oasis Final concept
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.
Fighting stigmas with influencers
College students today are the generation most likely to make a purchase based on social influence. By sharing the achievements, struggles, and steps taken as one cohesive story, Oasis can transform mindsets about mental health.
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
Complete more user testing
While I was able to conduct usability testing and get feedback on the overall function, I would like to do in-depth testing and validate the app’s ability to reduce stigma, provide support, and increase mindfulness.
Explore other aspects of mental health
Mental health and improving it is no short of complex. Medically it is still widely unknown why certain people experience things like anxiety and depression and why others don’t. To truly build Oasis it would be crucial to attempt to gather a wider perspective.
