Week 4: Interviews, Ideas, Paper Prototypes
Findings from Round 1 of Interviewing
As our first round interviews from last week were still in full swing on Monday, we spent the first part of the week scrambling to talk to as many people as we could. By Wednesday, we had completed ten interviews with potential users and subject matter experts. Looking back on the interviews, we noticed a lot of interesting patterns about how people think about their mental health. Here are three of our most intriguing findings from talking to users and professionals about stress and anxiety:
- Almost everyone we talked to had experience with anxiety. This was a pretty big discovery for us because it is a much more common issue than we realized — almost everyone deals with it in some form.
- Everyone agreed that there is a negative stigma around mental health. Every single person we spoke to said that they were more comfortable talking about their own physical health than their mental health. This raised many more questions for us including, how are physical and mental health different? How are they related? Why are people more comfortable talking about physical health? These are all questions we would like to look into as we progress into the design and development stages of our product.
- People are unsure of when they should ask for help. This was a big theme that came up in our interviews as well. People we spoke to were generally unsure of what qualified as a ‘problem’. Stress seems to be universal and everyone experiences it, but at what point does it become unhealthy? Many people said that they didn’t know when they should consult a professional instead of handling their stress and anxiety on their own. Interestingly, most people waited until they had a trigger — an event or a physical reaction — involving stress or anxiety to seek a professional. In other words, they didn’t fully address their stress or anxiety until they needed to.
Sketch Sessions
We had another great sketch session with most of the office. It was really fun to get everyone together to come up with some cool ideas for our product. This time, we led the sketch session. This entailed preparing and presenting some of our findings from the interviews to give everyone a background on the insights we found, forming prompts for people to use as starting points for their sketches, running the timing of the sketching, and finally organizing all of the sketches into groups. We went from the mess of papers and sticky notes seen at the top of this post to three major themes — awareness, destress, and stigma as seen below. Each of these groupings also has further subcategories, but each sketch relates to at least one of those three elements.
Paper prototyping
The majority of the end of the week was spent starting our paper prototypes. After we went through all of the sketches, we highlighted some of our favorite ideas as well as ideas that were brought up multiple times during the session. From there, we began drafting basic prototypes using sharpies and printer paper. Sherry did some really great drawings of early ideas for different products we could pursue.
In all, it’s been a big week and we accomplished a lot. We’re excited to move into next week, where we’ll polish the prototypes a bit more and start showing them to users.
