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PROJECT

Our Space 

A mobile platform designed to bridge University of Toronto students with Health and Wellness activities and spaces while connecting them with like-minded peers.

INFO

Role

Led visual design direction 

Wireframed sketches and prototyped

Analyzed user research

Conducted usability testing

Timeline

September 2022 - December 2022

OVERVIEW

The Problem

First-year UofT students are pre-emptively seeking help to avoid a crisis state, but are unsuccessful due to the lack of resources for self-help. The first year is a pivotal time to reach students because of all university dropouts, more than 50% occur in the first year.How might we connect and support students with time, space, and like-minded peers to practice health & wellness?      

Our Goal

First-year UofT students are pre-emptively seeking help to avoid a crisis state, but are unsuccessful due to the lack of resources for self-help. The first year is a pivotal time to reach students because of all university dropouts, more than 50% occur in the first year.How might we connect and support students with time, space, and like-minded peers to practice health & wellness?      

Tools Used

Figma 

Miro 

​

Team

Me

Arielle Styrsky

Jennifer Hillhouse 

Sawyer Neame

Shaochenzi Wang

Shifan Sun 

END RESULT

USER RESEARCH

Exploring Secondary Research 

Using existing data from online research articles and online forums, our team contextualized the problem of seeking help in a university environment. During this step, we also assessed the current health and wellness resources available at UofT, specifically the Health and Wellness division of StudentLife. 

 

As a result of our preliminary research, we determined that for post-secondary students, help-seeking process involves several steps - from choosing whether or not to seek assistance to navigating available resources to actually using services and the results of using them. Both internal and external factors affect students' experiences at each step.

Primary Research 

To further understand the challenges and motivations of students’ attitudes and behaviours towards Health and Wellness services at UofT, we administered 28 responses to our digital questionnaire, conducted six interviews, and led one focus group with four students. 

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What did we learn? 

Insight #1

Despite the vast resource offerings at UofT, there are a lack of self-serve options for students.

Insight #2

Having a group of like-minded peers is the greatest motivator for students to practice H&W.

Insight #3

Attending official H&W services was challenging due to their hectic school schedules.

RESEARCH ANALYSIS

Why create a User persona? 

Creating a persona helped our team identify our user groups behavioural patterns, needs, experiences, and goals. This has helped us recognize what their expectations, concerns and motivations are and will help with better solution designing. 

Who is Nell the Newbie?

Nell is a first-year student who is new to campus. She spends long hours commuting to and on campus. Nell being new to campus has an introverted personality, but wants to look for a peer support network to aid with her mental wellbeing.

User Persona

EMPATHY MAPPING

Empathy Map of Nell

Why an empathy map?

To better understand Nell, an empathy map was created to visualize what she would say, do, think and feel while looking for Health and Wellness services. This data was captured based on knowledge and assumptions gathered from our interviews and questionnaire results. 

SCENARIO MAPPING

As-Is Scenario

Our team implemented our learnings and mapped out a workflow to understand how Nell would use approach her goal of practicing Health and Wellness on Campus. 

To-Be Scenario

With Our Space, Nell’s experience practicing health and wellness is drastically changed from when she tried to go through UofT’s Student Life website and access the Health & Wellness services they offer.

IDEATION

Prioritization Grid.png

Prioritization Grid

Our team brainstormed a broad range of ideas that could help improve Nell’s journey as referenced from our scenario maps.

 

After voting based on each solution’s level of impact and feasibility, we organized it on a prioritization grid.

 

To briefly summarize how we voted, marginal gains included ideas with low impact and feasibility, big bets represented ideas with high impact and medium feasibility, and quick wins had high impact with medium feasibility. Lastly, home runs represented ideas with high impact and feasibility.

5 vote dot were given per team member. 

5 vote dots per team members. 

Feasible

Impactful

DESIGN GOALS

Based on Nell’s needs and our best ideas, we developed three design goals with our hills in mind to help ensure our design decisions are grounded in our user research and solve the problem.

 

Each goal includes a primary feature and its value to the user:

01

How can first-year students practice health and wellness without struggling with paperwork?

02

How can first year students practice health and wellness on their own time and terms?

03

How can first-year students practice health and wellness and make like-minded friends doing it?

Goal

Solution

Notes

Self-service and Discoverability

Health and wellness program guide

Provides students with structural guidance on Health and Wellness tips and practices.

Connecting students with physical H&W spaces 

Connects students with existing places on campus that they can practice Health & Wellness at.

Events Directory

The variety of H&W resources at UofT should be displayed simply with fewer steps.

Fitting H&W practices into a Busy Schedule

Ping Notification Reminders

This helps to remind students to routinely make space for their H&W.

Quick Check-in

This allows students like Nell to check in and prioritize their health and wellness on their own terms, self-serve.

Health and Wellness status and progress

Serves as an indication for students to proactively examine their progress over time where they can learn insights to prioritize their H&W, and here users can view their dominant moods, activity and goals trends.

Finding like-minded peers to practice H&W

Group Chat

Users can join existing community chats to find peers that have the same interests and values. This also rids feelings of awkwardness compared to reaching out individually.

Adding buddy challenges

Users can personalize the goals they want to achieve together to foster motivation and routinely practice Health & Wellness between buddies and self.

LOW-FIDELITY SKETCHES

Based on our design goals, we developed a lo-fi prototype of our user flow. Four low-fi sketches of each user flows are displayed to the right:

  1. Ping Component for the “How are you feeling?” check-ins.

  2. Personalized Activity Suggestions.

  3. Buddy challenges and motivations.

  4. And Occasional Mood Trends (e.c.g. Spotify).

Check-In
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LEAN EVALUATIONS

After finalizing our paper prototype, we conducted lean evaluation in order to acquire usability feedback. Initially, our scope was only within the undergraduate community, however, we recognized our design solution could be used by all students at the University of Toronto. Since we conducted a lean evaluation, we performed a mixed method of 5 second tests and thinkaloud protocol in person.

The Participants

Our team recruited 4 participants (2 graduate students and 2 undergraduate student) attending the UofT. The participants were each shown a specific task flow.

User #1: Shown Buddies Flow

Dating style app to meet goals and complete activities with people

Individual chats, and activity with sharing capabilities

Post secondary students looking to meet people

Complex processes,  could hinder trustworthiness

Better buddies flow layout is needed.

 User #2: Shown Discover Flow

Find new activities

Overwhelming amount of Buttons & multitude of options

Students who just got in university

Step-by-step processes are helpful

 Too many elements

User #3: Shown the Check-in Flow

Motivational Mental Health app

Supportive messages, prompts and mood scales

Students who just got in university

Sense of familiarity…“looks like other apps”

Good: easy-to-learn

User #4: Shown Trends Flow

 Social media, but for mental health

Graphs and Rating Scales

Post secondary students people

Overall trustworthy

Good: clean & simple

Questions

What do you think is the purpose of the page?

What are the main elements you can recall?

Who do you think the intended audience is?

Did the design/ brand appear trustworthy?

What was your impression of the design of this flow?

CHANGES & TWEAKS

Using the feedback and findings gained from the lean evaluation methods, for the mid-fi prototypes I implemented each participants thoughts into the design decisions for the medium-fidelity prototype. Changes we made were:

Check-In Flow

  • Kept “how are you” push notification and added “check out these things near you” ping.

  • Removed emotions buttons (redundant) and feelings options, and simplified interface  by only including emojis as initial mood check-in (prior to “journal your thoughts”)

  • Reduced check-in to “3-clicks”

  • Used black to indicate clickable buttons and grayscale for the remainder of the screen

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Discover Flow

  • Removed the initial page “what are you looking for?” and instead made a Netflix list (recommended activities page) the initial page for the discover flow.

  • Reduced the number of steps from 10 to 5 (or 6 if the user shares the activity).

  • Added a group chat feature for the “discover” flow where attendees can ask questions or discuss the activity.

  • Added an Instruction Manual for self-guided Health & Wellness

Buddies Flow

  • Removed “say hi!” and DM feature for new / random buddies.

  • Instead of “make a new buddy” we now have “check-in on a buddy” (these are pre-existing connections, either friends who use the app or people met during activities who you have “buddied up” with)

  • Incorporated challenges into the buddy profile “what are you both working towards?

  • Reduced the number of buttons and cleaned up the screens

TESTING AGAIN

Another Round of Usability Tests

For each user-testing task, we measured time on task, task completion rate, and errors to assess the usability of our mid-fi prototypes.

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Flow 1: Check-In 

  1. For task 1A we asked the participant to navigate to the check in page

  2. For Task 1B we asked the participants to review and share their experiences once they have completed the activity.

These tasks were to see if the participant was able to “Check-in” on themselves through the application and share their completion of the activity after they are done.

Flow 2: Discover Flow

  1. For Task 2A : the participant will find a new health and wellness activity to engage with and find the directions towards completing said activity

  2. For Task 2B: the participant was asked to review and share their experiences with the activity.

The tasks above are to analyze whether the participants are able to find an activity to book within the application and share their activity with their contacts.

Flow 3: Buddy

  1. For Task 3A: the participant was asked to make a “buddy” through the buddy application

  2. For Task 3B: the user was asked to find a yoga session to attend with their “buddy”.

This was to gather information on how inclined the participants were to engaging with a potential new contact and attend a activity with them.

Tasks

Objectives

USABILITY TESTING RESULTS

These are major findings from our user testing and the table below presents some of the measures of central tendency derived from our task metrics (i.e., time on task, task completion rate and error rate)

Positive Results: 

  • 100% task completion rate indicates that our flows made enough sense to get to completion 

  • The check-in flow and discover flow took the users between 1m 12s and 1m 33s to complete, which for a moderate level of complexity was a reasonable time to complete each tasks. This indicated that the prompts and UI of the fist two flows were learnable, robust, safe and efficient for our users.

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Needs Improvement:

  • The time on task to complete the buddy flow was substantially higher despite the fact that we felt this flow was a similar level of difficulty as the other 2 flows tested. These results indicated that we needed to make some significant changes to the UI and feature available on the buddy page (discussed more in depth in the coming slides)

  • Other causes of errors were: unclear buttons, lack of visibility in the system status and inconsistencies between the UI of each flow. These errors point to usability problems regarding integration and aesthetic appeal

Next Steps for Our Space

How will we be moving forwards?

Continuous improvement is a never-ending strive for opportunity to grow and learn. Through Our Space, we hope to create an inclusive, supportive and uplifting space to learn strategies for managing health and wellness in the UofT student community. 

01

User-testing for improved mid-fidelity prototype. Running a think-out-loud 3-task scenario with follow-up questions. We also want to expand our user testing to include more 1st year participants since Our Space is primarily crafted with their needs in mind.

04

Taking a look at how we can inhibit “Anti-Users” and what behaviours we can anticipate from them and how we can craft reporting and moderation into Our Space to make it as safe as possible. 

02

Further iterating our solutions for designing high-fidelity prototypes to address usability pain points discovered during the usability test. 

Final draft by finalizing the hi-fidelity prototype, and preparing it for development of the application.

05

Creating more user personas, to figure out what are the unique “gems” of this app that attract people outside of our primary user base. Would ticket vendors be interested in the Discover flow “Event Group Chat” and promote to a crowd before an event?

03

Given that UofT has a diverse spectrum of learners and is very multicultural, test different ways to incorporate accessibility standards (i.e., via A/B testing) and language preferences for international and domestic students.

06

We want to explore how Our Space could further enhance the sense of community amongst UofT students and make it easier to find and be a part of certain student communities within UofT through health and wellness.

WHAT I LEARNED

As I finish off this project, I am filled with excitement and anticipation for what is to come as a Product Designer. This project has enabled me to spend nearly hundred of hours learning about design principles, user experience, the latest design tools, and I am eager to put my skills to the test in the real world.

Adapting to Challenges & Uncertainties

Throughout this project, I gained a greater understanding of how to adapt rapidly to changing environments and embrace the unknown. A pivot strategy can be adopted to achieve significant end results when adapting to changes in the process.

Incorporate diverse perspectives and work styles.

The team I worked on had members with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds, which gave each team member a unique viewpoint. Our differences allowed us to develop creative solutions and designs. We also learned to balance our work styles and empathize with each other.

Having a great design is a result of great research.

Through this experience, I learnt that research sets the stage for all design phases. We used robust initial research to identify the needs of users and then design solutions that address those needs using that knowledge.

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