Our design process was structured after the classical double diamond with the four stages: Discover, Define, Develop och Deliver. We worked a lot of sketching, wireframes, and mockups throughout the entire process and in total, the concept was developed from over 500 frames in Figma.

In my opinion, these were the most important parts of the process.

 

Sensitive subject:

As the project was centered around loneliness and mental health which can be seen as a sensitive subject we understood early in the process that we wouldn’t be able to meet and interview end-users.

For this reason, we developed a customized work process where we focused on qualitative user-centered focus without intervening with actual users. To do so we used a lot of already existing research on the subject and read reports done by other health departments at different Swedish universities and from the Folhälsovårdsmyndigheten. We also interviewed people with insights into student behaviors, mostly this interview was conducted with people working at the student health department, although they could not answer some of the questions because of professional secrecy we still could gather a lot of insights into student behavior.

 

App

Early in the process, we got the wish from the student health department that the digital service we developed could not interfere with the daily work of the staff, especially because the workload had increased under the pandemic. We, therefore, explored different ideas that could be used together with the health department but would not increase their workload. We chose to develop a concept in form of an app that would work independently from the health department but they would gain access to a specially designed admin interface so they could still monitor the activity in the app.

 

Evaluation

One crucial aspect in our process was how to work with the challenge in understanding how the lonely student felt whit out the option to meet and interview them. Through research and interviews with people that had insights into mental health problems among university students. We learned that a lot of students felt more secure when they were allowed to be anonymous. But at the same time, they felt less secure when they had to interact with other anonymous people.

To explore the anonymous paradox, we tested a lot of different ideas, wireframes, and prototypes to find the balance between opens and anonymity. A total of almost 200 wireframes were created in Figma to find the balance.

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We also conducted evaluations together with students from Halmstad University. The evaluation was conducted in three steps, first, the participants were asked to create a profile and fill in the information that they were comfortable with sharing. They were then asked to go through several profiles from other students, these profiles were however fake but this information was kept from the participants. In the second step of the evaluation, the participants were asked to choose one of three workshops to participate in. The participants could see other participants and were asked to explain their choice. The last step of the evaluation consisted of interviews with the participants.

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The evaluation made it possible for us to understand what kind of information was crucial for the profile page to feel personal without making the users uncomfortable. We also learned which information was too personal or didn't need in the profiles.