Accessing Mental Health Resources at the University of Toronto (UofT)

The Division of Student Life in the University of Toronto advances student success through experiences, services and facilities. This department provides a range of physical and mental wellbeing programs and information to support students in achieving their personal and academic goals.

Role

UX researcher, Visual Designer

Tool Used

Figma, Balsamiq, Mural, Office 365

Methodology

Survey, User Interview, lean Evaluation

Team & Timeline

Hanna, Rakan, Paniz, Rola & Hadis (Oct-Dec 2020)

Project Goal

Students can tailor their access to UofT Student Life resources so that they can access them faster than navigating the UofT Student Life website.

The Problem

Students are not able to save and follow their favourite resources

- Students should open each program page to check if they are eligible
- The registration process is time-consuming
- Students have to call to health & wellness center to book an appointment with a counsellor.
- Students are not able to choose their counsellor based on their needs.

The solution

Established a personalized view of resources for focus, faster, and customized access by saving resources

- Students can check their eligibility for using the programs and services beforehand
- An integrated website to book an appointment with a counsellor with the facility to keep track of appointments.
- These solutions are accessible and integrated on the Quercus website (UofT online teaching and learning management system).
- Access to quick and manageable mental health resources for busy students helps them be mindful of their mental health.

Research

Conducted secondary research and user interview (Three of eight), Thematic analysis

Review
Define

Need statement, Produced an engaging persona, Empathy Map, Scenario Map

Review
Ideate

Big Ideas, Prioritization grid, Envisioned Journey

Review
Prototype & Test

Storyboards, Prototyping (mid-fid & high-fid), Evaluation (Three of six)

Review

1. Research

Methods

Needs, pains, and problems are collected from representative users who were current UofT students. Like everything else, we adapted our user research to the new normal during the Covid-19 pandemic. We recruited current undergraduate and graduate students through cold messaging on social media like LinkedIn and conducted surveys and interviews.

Click on photo to enlarge

Why

To have a minimal setup for our research. First, we conducted user interviews to know students’ emotions, motivations, beliefs and collect contextually rich data. Second, to collect diverse data to do a fast analysis, we chose the questionnaire method. Listening to different voices and stories allowed us to gather pain points and shape our design’s backbone. Through analyzing the survey and interview data, we were able to have a modest understanding of UofT’s students’ attitude towards accessing university mental health resources.

Click on photo to enlarge

Key Findings

Busy schedule

Students expect to access reliable and relevant mental health programs and resources efficiently because of their busy schedules.

Overwhelmed

There is too much information on the website that makes it hard to identify the resource they need.

Takes time

The sign-up process takes a lot of time, which stops them from participating.

2. Define

We analyzed the data to produce a student's persona to guide the team through a user-centred design. We also developed an empathy map to visualize what a UofT student does, thinks, says, or feels for empathizing. To concentrate on the student's tasks, we picked some pain points to form her scenario map (As-Is-Scenario) through which we told her story of doing, feeling, thinking. To shape the next step, we voted on the pain points that matter.

“I think my friend can provide me with better information.”

Sara Paretsky

Student at U of T
Master of Information

25 year-old

Canadian Citizen

- Feeling overwhelmed & stressed due to her course load.
- Does not have a lot of time
- She knows that she needs mental health support but doesn't know which one is right for her.
- Find mental health and wellbeing support to balance personal and academic success.
- Customized access to her mental health needs.
- Visit a counsellor to manage her anxiety.

3. Ideate

Thinking deeply about students' needs, we brainstormed ideas individually and then gathered as a group to discuss and assess our big ideas!

Mental Health Dashboard

An accessible Mental Health dashboard on Quercus. This solution had a tactical advantage. Quercus is a learning and management system that students spend a lot of time there.

Quizzes to Identify Needs

High-level and quick questions to onboard the students and tailor their access to resources based on what they want.

Matching with Counsellor

Students can book an appointment with a counsellor based on their needs and counsellors’ professional experience.

We created a prioritization grid to examine the impact and feasibility of our ideas and voted on it.

- Does it help to address a pain point?
- Does it create value for Sara?
- Can we implement this as a group?
- Is it technically feasible?

Sara’s Envisioned Journey

This is how I envisioned a successful journey for Sara as she accesses Student Life resources on Quercus.

4. Prototype & Test

Low-fid, mid-fid and high-fidelity

Based on the first and second lean evaluation findings, I produced a high-fidelity prototype, and I then performed a third round of evaluation to get feedback.

Check out some first, second, third round of evaluation findings in bellow

High-fidelity Prototypes

Save a resource

Added the Student Life call-to-action (CTA) on the global sidebar Quercus (Student learning platform) to improve students' access to the resources.
I redesigned the questions pages. More extensive buttons allow multiple selections for accessibility reasons.
The availability to share the resources with their friends because students love getting suggestions from their peers.

Book an appointment

Students can check their eligibility to be sure the health services are available to them
An effortless booking appointment with a counsellor
A sync calendar to check their availability and counsellor availability
A well-organized dashboard to keep track of their favourite resources and appointments

Next Steps

I believe designing user experience never ends. The iteration of evaluation is one of the main components of the UX cycle. The next step is adding new features and tasks to user flows and running usability testing to evaluate.

Lessons Learned

User research is the foundation of design thinking, and intense user research leads to a worked well user-centric design.

How important it is to choose a research method in terms of stakeholder's time and budget.

Being able to vote on significant parts of the process, such as opportunities for improvement and solutions (ideas), made our design thinking process more engaging.

Lean evaluation plays a huge role in design thinking by which we understand if we are on the same page with representative users.

Seeking critical feedback can be a game-changer and how I should communicate my critical thoughts to our group.

References

Illustration: https://storyset.com/

Contrast Checker: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

Icon: https://material.io/

Next Project: Articulating Glenbow's Information Architecture (IA) Problems