Student Health First - Case Study
Project conducted in collaboration with UofT's innovation hub.
Group Members
David Buckley
Carson Edmonds
Zhaotian Li
Emeka Okoroafor
Ryan Mui
My Role
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Conducted interviews and created a survey as part of the groups primary research
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Engaged in the design process creating design artefacts, including designing and creating our user persona
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Created a clickable medium-fidelity prototype using Figma
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Conducted lean usability testing consisting of an observation and interview
Project Overview
"How can we help students at UofT get access to the mental health support they need?"
The Innovation Hub at UofT has published a document called "What UofT students care about". The brief for this project was to use this document to find a project that would benefit students. The area that struck us as a group as critical was a heading that wrote "Successful students are healthy students." This is something we all agreed was true, and based on our own experiences we knew that registering with the Health and Wellness centre at U of T could be challenging, we chose this as our problem area to investigate.
Our solution - to design a website specifically for the Health and Wellness centre, in contrast to having information about the service embedded inside a separate Student Life website. This website would inform students about the Health and Wellness centre services, allow them to register online and book appointments without needing to call the centre.
How things are
Health forms are displayed all in one long, complex list, with the two most common forms only available by calling the centre and requesting them.
Information on the Health and Wellness centre could only be found through the Student Life website, which has a Health and Wellness section to read though.
An advanced chat-bot exists to help guide users, but is limited to only being able to provide links to further information because of it's location on the student life page.
Research and Ideation
Conducting Primary Research to understand the problem space
To better understand the issues students were having with accessing the Health and Wellness centre I created a Google Survey for my group to circulate around students at U of T asking about their knowledge and experiences with the Health and Wellness centre. This was done in tandem with an interview study.
Survey introduction and information page
Many students have trouble registering, but a large number students had no knowledge of the service.
The solution: To simplify the registration process and make it easier for people to learn about the Health and Wellness centre.
Results from the Survey
Results from the Survey
Synthesising results into meaningful analysis
I took the lead in taking our 'proto-persona' an initial brainstorm of needs, obstacles and desires we identified from our secondary research, and building it out into a full persona we could use to help focus our later designs.
Simple proto persona put together collaboratively
Polished persona built in Figma
Ideas the group generated in a brainstorming session
A brainstorming session to ideate different ways our solution might be able to help Grace. Anything was on the table, from serious ideas like being able to book video calls with service advisors, to absurd ideas, a personal favourite being a magic wand that can wish away problems.
The voting process, assigning impact and feasibility votes from individual pools to ideas we felt deserving
To filter these ideas we then voted on their feasibility and impact, creating a grid we could then use to select the ideas we collectively felt would most benefit Grace, while also being within our scope.
A clean view of the prioritisation grid, showing which ideas we would then prioritise.
Design and Prototyping
Our Design Guidelines
We landed on 3 design guidelines we would use as the framework for our initial designs. These are the three most important, actionable things we believe our Persona, Grace, should be able to achieve with our solution.
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Grace can register with the HWC without having to upload a single document.
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Grace can access step-by-step information about HWC services that identifies the exact service she needs.
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Grace can schedule HWC appointments without having to talk to anyone.
Low Fidelity prototyping
Based on our design guidelines we began a process of iterative design for our low-fidelity prototype. We focused on designing three task flows that would meet our Design Guidelines.
1- Registration
2- Browsing of Health and Wellness centre information and resources
3- Booking appointments
We chose to design a dedicated website for the Health and Wellness centre that would allow the user to complete all three of the above task flows.
The evolution of our low-fidelity designs, from initial outline of the task flows on a white-board, then following one screen as it evolved throughout the iterative process.
Medium Fidelity prototyping
I took the lead in putting together a medium fidelity prototype using Figma. I wanted to stay true to the designs in the low-fidelity prototype, but to inject some colour and clarity into the design as well as including some improvements based on initial feedback we'd received from peers in our class.
One screen from the medium fidelity prototype, demonstrating its final appearance
This is a small section of the sequential storyboard I created with all the screens in our medium fidelity prototype.
Our medium fidelity prototype was fully clickable. This is an example of one of the task flows we created based on the third design guideline, "Grace can schedule HWC appointments without having to talk to anyone".
Evaluation
The three Observation tests:
1- Can you please try to register for an account with the HWC.
2- Can you please use the site to try and find out how long a counselling session booked through the HWC would last.
3- Can you please try and book a Mental Health Counselling session for a Monday.
Usability Testing
We gathered further feedback and evaluate the successes and failures of our current design by conducting four usability testing sessions following the study protocol that can be viewed to the right.
There were many specific pieces of learning and feedback gathered across the observations and interviews. These are what I found to be the four most salient learnings from the study.
Next Steps for this Project
There are three main area's I'd like to focus on if I were to take this case-study further. I believe these are necessary steps our group would need to take to get our solution to the point where it would need to be to be considered viable.
Lessons Learned
