Mentor 1101 — Charon Zhou

Roles & Responsibility

UX Researcher: conducted user interviews, designed surveys, and analyzed user research results
UI/UX Designer: delivered lo-fi & hi-fi prototypes, built visual design system, and conducted usability testing

Project Context

Duration: Aug 2022 - Dec 2022
Team: 3 Designers/Researchers
Project Topic: Mental Health, Mentorship, App Design, Human-Centered Design

Tools & Methods

Figma
Qualitative & Quantitative Research

Project Overview

Three modules of the basic model: mentor-mentee interaction, mentee self-learning and community.

💜 Mentor-mentee interaction: Mentors and mentees are required to have at least one one-on-one check-in meeting per month, in which the mentor would assess the overall well-being of their mentees, and recommend any mental health-related resources if necessary.

💜 Self-learning: There should be a way for mentees to raise awareness on mental health issues and learn about ways to adapt to Cornell on their own.

💜 Community: MENTOR 1101 should establish a sense of community for the mentors and mentees, a community that promotes trust and a safe and comfortable environment for discussing mental health topics.

Problem

Solution

A peer mentoring program that aims to prevent student mental health issues by helping new students smoothly adjust to Cornell University academically, socially and personally.

Design Impact

Impact on the school:

✅ Build a good image that the school cares about the mental health of its students

✅ Improve student academic performance and school retention

Impact on students:

✅ Help finds students

✅ Receive preventative help, not reactive help

✅ Make mental health resources more accessible

✅ Reduce the stigma of mental health problems

Impact on society:

✅ Reduce lifetime economic burden on mental illness treatment

✅ Increase productivity and life expectancy of U.S. citizens

Design Thinking Process

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 service provided by the school
Lacking knowledge about mental health resources
Privacy & safety concerns when asking for help
Difficulty finding the most compatible therapist
…

It’s a complex problem… Is there something we can do to help them?

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 students’ mental health problems

Current State

What are the existing mental health resources at Cornell?

Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS) at Cornell Health provides students with professional individual and group counseling, workshops, and referrals for therapy (Mental Healthcare).

After the suspension of its long-running formal peer counseling service in 2021, Empathy, Assistance and Referral Service (EARS) is currently transitioning into informal peer mentoring with a goal to improve mental health on campus

Student-run clubs such as Cornell Minds Matter and Body Positive Cornell focus on specific aspects of mental health such as reducing stigma for mental illness and raising awareness on eating disorders, respectively.

What are the problems with existing resources at Cornell?

Short of financial support from the school
Lack of mental health practitioners
Limited promotion
Poorly designed website pages and unfriendly user experiences

What other schools are doing?

“Crying@CU” by Columbia University

“Unmasked” by Dartmouth

“About 75% of students will contact their peers first when they are in trouble.”

User Research

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

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

Key Takeaways

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.

Redefine the Problem

Brainstorming

But…still many directions to explore

How might we narrow down our design scope?

Design Explorations

Competitive Analysis

What are the problems with existing mentorship programs?

They usually focus only on academic
Mentors are usually assigned arbitrarily by the school
Students don’t know which mentor program to attend

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

What are the user scenarios and actions? How do they feel?

Paper Prototype

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

Hi-fidelity 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.

Usability Testing

Evaluation Methods: task completion on prototypes, think-aloud protocols, and context-based questions

Metrics: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Error Rate