0-1 UX Design | App Design
Preventing mental health problems at Cornell University by designing a peer mentorship system
Project Type
0-1 UX Design
Duration
4 months
Team
3 Designers
My Role
UI/UX Designer
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Objective
Help new students at Cornell prevent mental health issues and fosters a welcoming environment for open discussions and support regarding mental health topics.
Problem
Mental health is a pervasive issue on college campuses nationwide, including at Cornell. Existing mental health resources at Cornell are primarily reactive and poorly distributed, posing challenges for students seeking timely and accessible mental health support.
A peer mentoring program that prevents student mental health issues by facilitating mentor-mentee interactions, encouraging self-learning on mental health topics, and fostering a supportive community.
Solution Overview
My Contribution
01. UX Design Lead: Delivered 80% of low-fi and high-fi prototypes, created a cohesive visual design system, and conducted 2 rounds of usability testing to gather feedback and iterate on the design
02. UX Researcher: Conducted 50% of user interviews and analyzed the research results to identify key insights and design directions
Design Impact
✅ 01. Achieved a reduction in time for students to receive mental health support.
✅ 02. Improved self-learning efficiency in providing well-organized resources.
✅ 03. 100% of the tested users are more willing to share mental health-related topics in public.
PROCESS
EMPATHIZE
Discover the Problem
Many college students are going through mental health problems and have a need for mental health services. But they have a hard time doing so…
We assume the reasons might be…
Unreliable mental health services provided by the school
Lacking knowledge about mental health resources
Privacy & safety concerns when asking for help
Difficulty finding the most compatible therapist
Possible research directions we can dive into:
Why aren’t the existing mental health services & resources working?
What are the barriers to students seeking mental health help?
What are the major causes of college student'’ mental health problems?
Current State
01. What is the current state of the national mental health situation in colleges?
02. What are the existing mental health resources at Cornell?
Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS)
Insights #1
Mental health has been a significant issue on virtually every U.S. college campus.
As a top U.S. institution, Cornell is also a part of the national crisis.
Empathy, Assistance and Referral Service (EARS)
Cornell Minds Matter
Insights #2
Problems with existing resources at Cornell:
01. Short of financial support from the school
02. Lack of mental health practitioners
03. Limited promotion
04. Poorly designed website pages and unfriendly user experiences
03. What other schools are doing?
“Crying@CU” by Columbia University
“Unmasked” by Dartmouth
Insights #3
“About 75% of students will contact their peers first when they are in trouble.”
User Research
Research Goal:
Understand how students usually deal with their emotions or mental health problems
Get students’ opinions about existing mental health support at Cornell
Understand how mental health services and organizations work, and what opportunities and challenges they face
Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Research (Interviews and Surveys)
Participants:
Survey participants - 49 Cornell students (2/3 are new to Cornell)
5 Interview participants - 3 mental health student activists and leaders, 1 administrator from the Skorton Center for Health Initiatives, and 1 experienced mental health practitioner
Key Insights
In the expert interviews, 80% of the experts identified “adjusting to college life” as the main cause of mental health issues.
In our survey, we found nearly 70% of students don’t know either CAPS or EARS.
In the survey, 75% of the participants reported they are too time-consuming to seek mental health help.
3 of the experts empathized that fear of judgment and the stigma of mental health might be a big problem for students not seeking help.
DEFINE
Redefine the Problem
From our research insights, we found the main cause of the mental health problems is “adjusting to college” so we will target freshmen (new students coming to Cornell, also including transfer, new graduate, and Ph.D. students) to help them adjust to college while maintaining good mental health.
By analyzing the limitations and the challenges faced by existing reactive methods at Cornell, we decided to focus on preventative mental health resources, because it is a more effective and efficient intervention compared to reactive methods.
IDEATE
Brainstorming
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How might we find the best solution to prevent mental health problems for new students coming to college?
Step 1. We initiated a brainstorming session. During the session, we generated numerous potential design solutions across various mediums and themes.
Step 2. Following that, we organized our ideas using an affinity diagram and identified common themes among them. We identified several compelling themes that warranted further exploration: Early Intervention, Enhanced Resource Distribution, Time Management, Stress Reduction, and Improved Self-awareness.
Step 3. We then synthesized some of the ideas and created visual sketches to represent our concepts more tangibly.
Step 4. Finally, we conducted a thorough evaluation of each idea, weighing their respective pros and cons, and ultimately determined that the "Mental Health Peer Mentoring" concept was the most promising of further development.
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Idea Synthesis & Design Explorations
Competitive Analysis
Key Insights
Our design aims to foster an environment where students feel comfortable discussing not only academic concerns but also other personal challenges and mental health-related subjects.
We would implement an onboarding process for both mentors and mentees. During this process, individuals would be prompted to provide information such as their gender, cultural background, interests, and areas of expertise (for mentors only). Utilizing this data, the system would then pair each mentee with the most compatible mentor based on their shared characteristics and interests.
We would provide students with personalized resources and support, eliminating the need to choose a specific peer mentor program to join.
What are the problems with existing mentorship programs?
They usually focus only on academic
Mentors are usually assigned arbitrarily by the school
Students spent a long time evaluating different programs
Design Goals
Based on all the research findings and the design explorations, we finalized 3 major design goals:
Problem-solving Process
I drew a funnel to illustrate our problem-finding process. We started with a broad topic of Mental Health and gradually narrowed down our problem scope and design scope through research. And we finally were able to redefine the problem and find something we can do.
Concept Map
How does the system work?
User Journey Map
What are the user scenarios and actions? How do they feel?
The basic model of MENTOR 1101 can be broken down into three modules: mentor-mentee interaction, mentee self-learning and community.
💜 Mentor-mentee Interaction
💜 Mentee Self-learning
💜 Community
PROTOTYPE
Sketches
Prototype
💜 Visual Design
we aimed to convey the following keywords: welcoming, diverse, supportive, educative, and professional. After conducting market research and experimenting with a variety of colors, we settled on a palette of purple, blue, green and pink, colors that often represent peace, tranquility and rest, which matches our theme of health and well-being.
🎯Goal 1: Help Finds Students
With the goal of Help Finds Students, we decided the mentors should do the most work to help.
From our student survey, we learned that one of the biggest barriers to seeking help is time, and we assume they would have little time to plan out meetings. So we decided to make it the mentor’s job to set up meetings with their mentees.
Scheduling check-in meetings
This prototype here is from the mentors’ view. The mentor should first create a when2meet form and after they find the best time to meet, the mentor creates the schedule and invites the mentee to confirm. All that the mentees would need to do is spend 10 seconds filling out a When2Meet, and then help would come to you. As simple as that.
Handling urgent messages
While designing our paper prototype, we realized mentees may worry about the delay of the responses of the mentor, especially in some urgent situations.
In order to address this potential issue, we added an Urgent Message button so their mentors would be able to receive a guaranteed notification. The mentors could then choose to reply with a quick answer, share helpful resources or invite the mentee to have a phone call.
In the prototype, the mentee is sending urgent messages to the mentor because she felt extremely anxious and the mentor replies very soon and invites the mentee to have a phone call.
Tracking mentees’ mental health conditions
And because we want to emphasize the idea of early prevention, we encouraged the mentees to share their health data so the system could detect the early sign of potential mental health problems (lack of sleep, or movements) and the mentors could give appropriate help in the first place.
The prototype is from the mentors’ view. For example, if the system detected the student has been sleeping deprived from the data, the mentor will receive a notification and the mentor can immediately share useful resources about sleeping health with the student.
🎯Goal 2: Make Resources Accessible
Well-organized and diversified resources in the self-learning tab
In order to address the goal of making mental health resources more accessible, we decided to include diversified content including videos, quick tips, and organized resources.
As shown in the prototype, mentees can explore the article of Managing Anxiety with detailed coping methods. All content in the Learn tab would be posted by mentors, as part of their assignments.
🎯Goal 3: Reduce the Stigma
Foster a supportive community by encouraging mentees to share their experiences
In order to cultivate trust between mentors and mentees, and make them feel comfortable with sharing thoughts on mental health issues, we designed this Share tab.
Here, mentees are required to submit photo proof of their check-in meetings. While having the option to set the post to private, we encourage the mentees to share it with the rest of the community. And in this share tab, we won’t allow users to like or comment on posts, in order to reduce anxiety.
This would convey 2 strong and inspirational messages to the community: 1) mentees can form tight relationships with their mentors, and 2) mentees can publicly take pride in learning more about mental health.
Evaluation Methods: task completion on prototypes, think-aloud protocols, and context-based questions
Metrics: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Error Rate
Participants:
4 mentors - 2A&S Peer Advisors&, ILR Peer Mentor, and Hotelier Peer Mentor
3 mentees - 1 international graduate student and 2 undergraduate freshmen
3 experts - the associate director for the orientation program, the director of the peer advising program, and a staff member at the CALS mentorship program
Usability Testing Results
Evaluation Goals:
Find out if the features and functions are easy to understand and if the user flow is intuitive by evaluating if they can complete all the tasks without confusion.
For mentees, we want to test if having the resources directed to them helps them in the way that seeking help becomes easier by observing their emotions and actions and asking in-depth post-session interview questions.
Find out what aspects the mentors and mentees value and what’s the preferred way of communication.
Figure out if the overall visual design could help create a welcoming and warm community and give incentives for students to continue using it.
TEST
Usability Testing
Future Improvement
Improve our design to prioritize the mentees’ privacy and safety
Make some buttons more accessible by showing them explicitly
Add a user walkthrough during the onboarding to teach them the affordances of some features
REFLECTION
Challenges
It has been an incredibly rewarding journey to witness the evolution of our ideas on these whiteboards, culminating in the discovery of a solution that is truly meaningful and impactful ✨