A.C.T.
Address. Challenge. Today.
A.C.T. is a mental health support application that we designed for students at the University of Toronto, allowing them to easily view, access and book personalized mental health services that are tailoring to their specific needs and preferences.
Team work:
This is a class group project where the five of us all took part in research, define, ideate, prototyping and usability testing.
Team:
Yumeng Fan
Ivan Lou
Matthew O’Reilly
Chiheng Zhou
My Contributions:
+ Led User Research
+ Led Usability Testing
+ Presented in 4 play-back presentations
Skills Developed
User Research, Affinity Diagramming, Data Analysis, Persona, Customer Journey map, Prioritize Ideas, Wireframing, Quick Prototyping, Usability Testing
HOW MIGHT WE improve the mental health supports so that our users are more successful based on their satisfaction with the counselling quality and further plans, time taken to access support, and stress level after the session?
Problem
Current mental health services offered by the University of Toronto is not meeting goals such as ease of accessibility, personalized support and understanding of cultural barriers.
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This is causing an increased level of stress and anxiety that students experience, leading to negative impressions of the existing mental health services delivered by the University.
Goals
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Address the existing knowledge gap as it pertains to the mental health services offered by the University of Toronto to its students.
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Provide services in a timely and accessible manner while considering cultural and language barriers for those accessing the services.
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Provide more personalized suggestions and plans of action for mental health support
Our Process
DISCOVER
We want to learn about factors that affect U of T students' mental wellbeing, their coping strategies and most importantly, their experience with the U of T mental health support service.
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We first distributed surveys that allow us to gather information from a large number of target users within a short period of time.
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We then conducted remote semi-structured interviews that helped us to gather more in-depth qualitative information and gain a deeper understanding of our participants' attitudes.
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Lastly, we organized all qualitative data into two affinity diagrams.
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See the complete user research analysis report
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- Main Takeaways -
Survey
58 Responses
A
A majority of students (47/58) experience a high level of anxiety and depression, with academic demand (50/58) and work (43/58) being the primary source of negative energy.
B
Most students (50/58) didn't try services offered by the school due to a lack of knowledge of currently available services and ways to access them.
Remote Interview
12 interviewees
C
Those who have tried the services struggled with booking the appointment and have to wait for 2-4 weeks to receive support.
D
Students found existing services being too generic and failing to address specific individual needs.
DEFINE
In order to empathize with our target users and better understand their wants and needs,
we summarized insight gained from our research and created - Andrea the Academic.
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So now, let me introduce you to Andrea, a 21 years-old engineering student who is currently struggling with the heavy workload and demands of her academic life.
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We also developed a user journey map for Andrea as this will help us to better understand and visualize the struggles that our users faced during their journey seeking mental health support at U of T.
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From this journey map, we learned that the current service failed to address students' needs for mental health support. It is:
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Not Accessible: Hard to find
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Not timely: No prompt help
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Not personalized: Not effective
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IDEATE
After learning about the struggles that Andrea (our target user) faced, we have proposed 3 needs statements and generates ideas that aim to address these needs.
= Preferred Ideas
Need #1:
Our user ​(Andrea) needs an easy way to access existing services ​so that she can choose personalized services that fit her needs and preferences.​
Need #2:
Our user (Andrea) needs a way to know the time slots availability​ so that she can fit the support into her busy schedule.
Need #3:
Our user (Andrea) needs a way to make appointments and receive support quickly​ so that she doesn't have to suffer from long wait time.
As you can see, we have brainstormed a lot of ideas, but how do we trade-off features, functionality, cost and impact?
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We considered two criteria: feasibility (is the idea doable, how much does it cost - time and money-wise) and impact (how much will this idea help our user).
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Then, we ranked all of our ideas according to these two criteria and put together a prioritization grid. Lastly, we eliminated ideas that are low on both ends.
Ideas with high feasibility and impact
Wireframe
As a group of 5 designers, we held different perspectives towards our project. In order to align our understanding of the direction that we need to go to help our user achieve their needs and wants, we first crafted and agreed upon 3 hill statements.
Then, we designed a set of low-fi sketches on our own, voted on the parts that we liked about each others' design and combined the ideas.
Hill
A
Andrea can easily view and access available and personalized mental health services at the click of a button.​
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*Please note that the pictures do not reflect the final design ​
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B
Andrea can see all available appointment time slots and book an appointment that integrates seamlessly into her personal schedule.​​
*Please note that the pictures do not reflect the final design ​
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C
Andrea can access supplementary mental health services to get instant relief while waiting for her scheduled appointment without having to go search for it again.​
*Please note that the pictures do not reflect the final design ​
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You can also see our mid-fidelity prototype
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Hill
Hill
- Improved Journey -
Remember how Andrea's previous mental health support seeking journey went?
Yeah... It was not satisfying.
Fortunately, she doesn't need to experience that anymore.
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Let's take a look at how our app improved Andrea's support seeking journey.
REVIEW
Though we were satisfied with our creation, we understand that any design that did not go through rounds of iteration can't call itself perfect. So, here comes the usability testing.
During the pandemic, we were unable to meet any of our participants in person but we solved the problem by conducting 5 usability tests on ZOOM.
Participants were all U of T students (Undergrad/Graduate) who is motivated to seek out mental health support.
They were asked to think-aloud and share their screen while completing 3 usability tasks.
We observed participants' behaviour and conducted a follow-up interview with them to gauge their impression of our app.
ITERATION
Overall, participants had a positive impression of our app. They think that it is intuitive and easy to navigate around. All participants mentioned that this app is really helpful and they hope that it can be put into use in the near future.
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After the usability test, we created an affinity diagram that organized all the feedback we gathered into 4 themes:
A
B
C
D
- NEXT STEP -
Refine
Branding
High Fidelity
The high-fidelity prototype will be updated soon - stay tuned!
LESSON
LEARNED
I learned about the value of feedback in this project. As a designer, I have spent the past 2 months thinking over my project and refining every single idea. I sometimes neglected the fact that our first-time user does not have the same level of familiarity as me: what I find straightforward might not be intuitive to them.
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Whenever I feel satisfied with our design, I would receive feedback that tells me - okay, there's still space for improvement. Though I tend to get discouraged by these comments, now I appreciate how they allowed me to make huge improvements to our design, which will ultimately lead us step-by-step closer to something maybe still imperfect, but definitely a better and more user-friendly product.
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