Student Mental Health

How might we help post-secondary students deal with their stress and anxiety while attending school?

Anna Do
Anna Do
Jul 21, 2017 · 11 min read

Overview of the Problem

Over half of Canadian post-secondary students have reported overwhelming stress and anxiety while dealing with their academic careers (NCHA Spring 2016 Report). And yet, the number of people reporting that colleges and universities are not providing support continue to rise. While colleges and universities expect students to seek for help when needed, students are deterred from getting help due to lack of insight into their own problems and the long wait time between counselling sessions.

My aim with this project is to provide a tool that helps students with stress and anxiety to support themselves through their everyday activities. In particular, I attempt to answer the question of how might we help post-secondary students deal with their stress and anxiety while attending school everyday?

Design Principles

Below is a list of design principles that I strive to apply to this project and to my design process.

Joyful experience

I strive to provide a joyful experience for the user in my design. User should be able to feel a sense of bliss and delight when using my design — whether that is visually or through interacting with it.

Principles:

  • incorporate delightful micro-interactions
  • provide detailed feedbacks that utilize the five senses
  • instructive and humorous

Enhance user’s life

Design should be used as a tool to enhance the user’s life, not hinder it. The design’s goal is to let the user perform everyday activities easily without trouble.

Principles:

  • accessible for everyone
  • global — designed for the world
  • familiar to everyone
  • straight to the point — no jargon

Be optimistic

The design aims to promote confidence from the user and incur positive/optimistic feeling with every interaction between the user and the design.

Principles:

  • optimistic language, visual, and illustration
  • ask for forgiveness, not permission
  • design for a human as a user
  • mistake-friendly usability functions

Cohesive experience

The design should provide a cohesive experience through the use of consistent design elements. Users should never get lost and should be able to pick up where they left off when using the design.

Principles:

  • auto-save states
  • consistent look and feel across platforms
  • focused tasks and contexts at hand

Research, Divergence, and Transformation

Qualitative and Quantitative Research

I start off this project by researching qualitative and quantitative data in order to find out more on the topic of post-secondary students dealing with stress and anxiety. Some key points that I focus on from my research are:

Divergence and Transformation

I then embarked on the Divergence and Transformation process — the design process in which I look into solutions from adjacent or unrelated fields from my design problem, and transform them into something of my own. I purposefully look for design solutions that answer the question of “will this improve the lives of the target users?” because I aim to provide a solution that would improve the lives of post-secondary students dealing with stress and anxiety. The following are three design solutions I have found that match my search.

1. Healthy Baby Toolkit

Summary: Healthy Baby is frog’s solution that supports the mother from the start of pregnancy through the gestation period and after birth. It is a holistic toolkit that includes nutritional and dietary supplements: a care package that contains a clean sheet, gauze, a naval clip, a linen wrap, and information about the pregnancy and medications. The mother receives an SMS code that lets her contact a health worker for refills and information. The kit also contains a transportation ticket to encourage visits to a health worker located up to 20 miles away.

What I like about Healthy Baby: The toolkit is convenient in that it allows the mother to stay in the comfort of her home and care for her pregnancy. In addition, the toolkit contains an SMS code for the mother to contact a health worker when needed — providing the mother with additional help while she cares for the baby at home.

Consider: What if there is a toolkit that contains items students may need to get through stress and anxiety while attending school?

2. Student-Centered Cafeteria Experience

Summary: IDEO tackles the challenge by encouraging kids to eat lunch through a redesigned dining experience. The outcome is a complete redesign of the school cafeteria, in which they develop recommendations for three dining experiences that target three age groups — elementary school kids, middle school kids, and high school kids.

What I like about IDEO’s Cafeteria design: IDEO solves the problem of students having to wait in line to get their food by using an online portal to take their orders. They also personalize each student’s experience by allowing students to control their food budget, and choose food based on diet restrictions. Students are able to pick up their food at the grab-and-go pick-up stations, use the vending machines for pre-packaged food, or pick food from staff-served carts.

Consider: What if there is a digital solution that provides easy access to help, as well as being able to note down each student’s problems while dealing with stress and anxiety?

3. MyFitnessPal

Summary: MyFitnessPal is a mobile app that allows the user to log their calorie intake, nutritional information, and weight. The app has proven to be successful in promoting weight loss by encouraging people to track their food via calorie counting, and eat under a set amount that has been calculated based on their height and weight.

What I like about MyFitnessPal: I have been using MyFitnessPal for almost a year and it has made tracking calories a regular activity for me everyday. I eventually become obsessed with tracking my weight in order to maintain a streak within the app. It also lets me share my goals and achievements with my friends — creating a sense of accomplishment that helps push me to continue using the app.

Consider: Perhaps my design solution should look into encouraging students to perform activities and goals that help them achieve a sense of accomplishment. In addition, I would like to consider the question of whether students would feel better about their stress and anxiety if they are able to track their symptoms and feelings.

Convergence

Once I have finished the Divergence and Transformation process, I attempt to use the ideas I have considered in order to combine and create a solution for my wicked problem.

At this point, I realize that I want my solution to be both physical and digital. I recognize that students that are stressed and anxious have to battle the symptoms regularly, so I hope to create a solution that students are able to take advantage of without worrying about whether they have the right tool. This would also allow me to apply my design principles of enhancing the user’s life and cohesiveness.

In the convergence process, I look into putting myself in the target users’ shoes and create a solution of my own. In order to do this, I start with sketching out some user stories that pertain to my target users.

User Story: Mary

Mary is a 23 year-old Biology student at a well-known University. She is the first generation of her immigrant family from China to attend University, and often finds herself stressing over her parents’ expectation of her to get into med school.While she maintains a happy front, Mary finds that she is unable to talk to anyone about her feelings. She also finds it hard to seek for counselling help as she often gets dismissed by her parents when she tells them that she is stressed.

User Story: Samantha

Samantha is a 26 year-old international University student who has been living in Toronto for one month. She recently moved to Toronto from Brazil, where she seldom spoke English. Samantha finds Toronto to be very foreign compared to Brazil due to language and cultural differences. In addition, she is unfamiliar with Toronto’s curriculum as compared to Brazil’s. As a result, Samantha often finds herself anxious when interacting with others, and has trouble making friends in University. She feels that she is cornered with nowhere to go because she believes that her problem is too trivial to even seek for help.

Proposal: Potion

I would like to propose a 2-part design solution — called Potion. The first part is a toolkit that students may use when they are stressed or anxious. The toolkit would contain items such as a sleeping mask, a stress ball, a small punching bag, and a head massager. The toolkit is offered for free by the school and it is available to be picked up at their health centre, on campus, or at their dorm. The appealed student has the option to subscribe and be mailed a new kit each month or they may pick it up at school.

Along with standard items to deal with stress, the kit will also contain a game or an activity to help students deal with stress and anxiety. For instance, a game could consist of a small jigsaw puzzle. The student would be able to write down a secret message when completed the game and upload onto a digital app to earn points and unlock characters (i.e., the second part of the design proposal). The game or activity included in the kit would be the ones that promotes a sense of fulfillment, and helps reduce stress and anxiety (No more panic — Dealing with anxiety). The secret message is a tip on how to handle feeling stress or anxious.

  • Research has shown that writing down one’s mood allows their feelings to be less intense (Putting Feelings Into Words). The app would provide a journal that lets the user to create and edit entries in order to cope with their stress and anxiety.
  • The ‘gate-keepers’ are the student’s local peers, dorm leaders, teaching assistants, or even qualified therapists that have gone through mental health training and are able to recognize signs of distress of the student user. They would be able to address the student user’s concerns and provide possible consultations or referrals to counselling within the school or nearby.
  • Similar to the kit, the app itself also contains activities and games meant to promote a sense of fulfillment, and help reduce stress and anxiety.

Points are awarded throughout the app to motivate the student to continue using it. The student is able to reach certain milestones based on the number of points they get. Illustrated trophies and characters (i.e., Drops) are then awarded to the user as achievements. This is in hope that the app will provide a joyful experience and provide the necessary optimism for the user.

My aim with this design proposal is to allow a sense of cohesion between the kit and the app. The user may use the app and the kit separately, or combine to earn more points. This also goes along with my design value of enhancing the user’s life, as these products are meant to help the student, and not to make their life more difficult.

Behind the Name

The name is based on the potion item in games that allow a user to heal. I want the user to treat the toolkit and the app as a potion that they can use to help themselves.

Design’s Challenges and Limitations

A feature in this design solution requires a community of ‘gate-keepers’ that would be trained to recognize signs of stress and anxiety among students. This means that in order for the proposed solution to be successful, a dedicated community needs to be created and secured fundings need to be put in place. This is a challenge that must be addressed.

This design is largely dependent on the user completing activities and games within the app and the kit. While there may be numerous activities that reduce stress and anxiety, it is not necessary to provide a new game or activity for every monthly release of the kit. Recycling the game or activity to be included in the kit is fine, provided that there is a way to track the new addition of points (e.g. a different secret message).

It is also difficult to be able to track whether a user has truly finished a game or activity within the app. Users may get points simply from inputting the secret message and not completing the activity or game. This is fine, because the design encompasses the value of being optimistic in that it believes the user would want to take part of the game or activity, and if not, the design hopes that typing down a positive message would improve their psyche.

In addition, I was unable to perform a thorough user testing with this design solution due to the time limitation. If possible, I would like to be able to test the product with the targeted users and improve upon feedback.

Personal Reflection and Moving Forward

The designs of the apps’ screens were created as a mean to illustrate how I would imagine the app should look like. Moving forward, I would like to truly work towards creating and designing how the app should appear. I would also be interested in developing the application and speak to my University’s mental health club about creating this kit.

Through tackling this project, I was able to learn how to think outside of the box and ‘steal like an artist’ (reference to Austin Kleon’s book). This has allowed me to conceptualize a design solution that I am proud of as my own. Moving forward I would like to use what I have learned to tackle other wicked problems.

)

Anna Do

Written by

Anna Do

I write so I remember what I learned.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade