overview
With the current state of the pandemic, we were tasked with designing a solution or product that would improve upon a course of action for the population. In other words, the task was to visualize how technology could help in making the lives of people easy during the COVID-19 lockdown situation.
idea
research
FORESEEABLE PROBLEMS
future scope
PROJECT TYPE
Global UXD Design jam collaboration.
TOOL
Figma
TEAM
During our discussion, we came across the fact that the Frontline Workers were affected the most. Taking into consideration the stress and amount of work being done on the front at hospitals and testing facilities, we concluded that the product should be for these professionals.
Nikita Gokhale
Jonathan Fong
Kathleen Tucker
David Cheng
In talking with friends who are healthcare workers, we felt there is a need for them to find a way to talk to someone when they need help getting through the elevated amount of stress and work they are taking on.
The research was divided into two parts: A user survey and a comparative analysis of other applications.
THE SURVEY
We made a questionnaire and sent it out to the professionals dealing with the pandemic. Due to their extremely crazy working hours, we got fewer responses than we had expected.
From the survey, we gathered that:
THE conclusion from the survey
From the survey and from talking to a few healthcare professionals, we concluded that the following were the things they wanted to accomplish using technology:
A safe space to talk freely.
A sense of community of like-minded professionals in their field.
A platform to share their stories.
Someone to talk to – someone in a professional capacity – at the end of shifts that were particularly hard.
Comparative Analysis
We compared a few applications that dealt with mental health care to try and understand how these apps work on a psychological level.
Vent - Express yourself freely ( see app )
Talkspace Online Therapy ( see app )
USER PERSONA
Stop, Breathe & Think: Meditation & Mindfulness ( see app )
We also came up with a user persona that the application would be best suited for.
After gathering all the information that was vital for our application, we decided that we would design a mobile application. Our decision was based on the fact that these medical professionals don’t get a lot of time to use technology anyway when they are on the line of duty. By creating a mobile app, we plan on providing them with a stress relieving tool at their fingertips.
USER flows
We then established that there would be 4 user flows - Join group, Creating a group, Post on a group, Chat, and Talk to the Therapist. The user flows can be depicted as follows:
style guide
Coming up with the color palette was actually a no-brainer for us. We wanted to give out a positive yet professional vibe with our application, so we all were anyways leaning towards shades of blue and yellow since blue feels more professional but yellow gives out a very happy, sunny vibe. We also decided on Lato as our typeface because it’s easy on the eyes.
wireframes
final design
This is the first page that you see when you open the application. you can choose to see posts from people that you follow, groups that you follow or you can book an appointment. You can also message other people. the ‘ADD’ button lets you create a post.
You can view comments and reactions to each post. Individual boxes for each comment make it more legible and the reply and like buttons outside the box make them more visible and clickable.
You can type what you want to write here and if you want, you can attach images, videos, GIFs, and hashtags to the post.
The comment and reply section is inspired by Instagram since by now most of our user demographic is comfortable using this style of commenting.
my contribution in this challenge
You get to choose of where you wish to post your post. You can post them on the groups of your choice or you can create a global post.
You can create your own group. There is an option for the admin to make the group private using the privacy setting and the admin of a private group can let the joining members into the group. Remember the ‘Pending’ in My Groups?!
This is the My Groups page, where you can see the groups you are a part of, similar groups you can join, and groups that you have requested to join - ‘Pending’.
This is the Notifications page. The latest notifications, that you have not viewed, will be highlighted. You will get notifications of your individual pages and groups. This page also lets you browse through the list of people who have sent you a follow request.
I was one of the two designers who worked on the Talk to the Therapist flow. The following are the screens that I have worked on:
Select a therapist
The psychiatrists act on a voluntary basis and are available infrequently. The choose a therapist shows a real-time list of therapists available at that moment. The icons show the method of contact preferred by these therapists. The user can click one of the methods they would like to use to contact the therapist, and in case of audio or video calls, they are directly connected to the psychiatrist at the click of a button.
chat with the therapist
If the user chooses to chat with the therapist, there is a provision to have a 15-minute chat session. The idea behind timing these sessions, is that the healthcare workers and the volunteer psychiatrists both will be accessing the app during their break from their actual work, hence it’s important that there is a just time allotment for the same.
If the user is talking to a therapist for the first time and they wish to talk to the same therapist again, they can add the said therapist to their favorite by tapping on the star icon.
END OF session
When the session ends after 15 minutes, the user gets a pop-up message. After that, if the user still needs help, they can talk to another therapist or if they have fixed another appointment with the same therapist through the chat the can continue. They can also return to the dashboard if they feel better after the 15 min. session.
Privacy - in posting and in chatting, there is always a fear of an employer seeing it and not approving
Hidden names - no public identities
Make the app paid? - to encourage privacy
Ensuring users won’t be wasting their time with psychologists
Finding psychologists that would volunteer their time
May need to incentivized
Work with universities and use their resources/grad students/residents for hours
We plan on adding a meditation component or some tools for mental exercise.
We see this being a viable product for a pandemic-free future, extending to other frontliners like police, firefighters, and paramedics, since they already have stressful jobs, pandemic or not.
conclusion
To conclude, this could be a fine tool for the healthcare workers at the frontline to cope with this pandemic as a community and have professional help at their fingertips.
Building the product was a fun learning experience, with each team member adapting to the working styles of others, giving relevant input, and learning new design tools and principles as the product was being built and doing all this remotely!
