Unifriend

Unifriend is an app designed to bring together students with common interests. By promoting student health, this app contributes to the UN Global Goals, focusing on the goals of “Good health and well-being” and “Quality education for all”.

Problem

Students lack a common platform to interact and get to know other students with similar interests. For some, this can lead to isolation and loneliness, which in turn affects mental health.

Role

UX / UI DESIGNER

Duration

5 weeks, November-December 2022

Design process

During five weeks, this project, based on Participatory Design and its principles, developed a digital platform for students. The project was led by myself and two other students at Stockholm University in the Participatory Design course. This was carried out with four methods: 

(1) Contextual exploration, (2) Future workshop, (3) Prototyping with participants & 

(4) Evaluation. The design theme of this project has been to promote student well-being and health, based on the UN’s Global Goals 3 and 4. These global goals are as follows:

3. good health and well-being

4. quality education for all.

Method 1 - Contextual exploration

In the contextual exploration, the principle of focus and its design situation was already determined. As the project focused on student health, students were the obvious participants. After finding suitable participants, consent forms were written in which the participants agreed to their participation and were informed about the project.

 

Next, three contextual explorations were carried out with three participants. Each group member performed one contextual exploration each. By being in the participants’ context and accompanying them during a study day (at the university and the students’ home environment), data was collected via observations and questions. The role adopted by myself was as an observer and interviewer, when questions that needed to be answered arose. Smaller interviews were also conducted on site. The data collected was noted down using paper and pencil, mobile phone and computer. The observations could look like this:

The contextual exploration was analyzed using affinity diagrams, based on the observations made by the participants. This was done to interpret the data collected and to categorize the main problems through clustering.

Results

The results showed that there were five common, overarching problems regarding students and their mental health/illness. These five were “social”, “distance vs. on-site teaching”, “course organization & schedule”, “stress/anxiety – school” and “help”. The observations and opinions were clustered together in affinity diagrams (see below). All participants described that the social aspect was difficult in one way or another.

Method 2 - Future workshop

A future workshop is a method that uses invited participants to develop alternative solutions to the problems they are asked to criticize at the beginning of the workshop. The participants are those affected by the problem and can be, for example, users. This method was done in five phases: 

 

  1. Preparation phase: the organisers of the foresight workshop determine the theme/focus, invite participants, prepare materials and tools, venue, timetable. Moderators should be appointed to present the above and the purpose of the foresight workshop.
  2. Critique phase: the problem is discussed in depth by the participants of the foresight workshop and the current situation is criticised. Brainstorming is an advantageous technique to use in this phase.
  3. Imagination phase: participants should work out a utopia, using brainstorming or other techniques. This involves sketching out alternative, future solutions to current problems.
  4. The implementation phase: the ideas developed in the previous phases are checked and evaluated in terms of their practical possibilities. An action plan is made.
  5. Follow-up phase: the material is collected from the previous phases. An evaluation of the workshop can be made with the participants in terms of the method itself: what was good, what should be improved and so on.

The Future Workshop was carried out with the three participants from the previous method in a group room at Stockholm University. The project managers were divided into two roles: two moderators and one observer, where the undersigned was the moderator. 

 

During the implementation of each phase, the participants first worked divergently through individual brainstorming, and then together converged the thoughts and ideas developed. The materials used during the Future Workshop were post-it notes. The method ended with a review of the post-it notes and the observations recorded by the observer.

Results

From the Future Workshop, clear themes in the critique phase had emerged. These were:

 

  • lack of information: that is, the students agreed that there was a lack of information (from the university) about how and where to seek help for mental health mental health problems related to studies.
  • lack of accessibility of the social: difficult to get in touch with other students outside the school at SU. There are not enough ways and the existing ways do not reach all students.
  • messy: due to different types of course arrangements and the way the courses are structured (on the the school’s platform) creates stress due to different types of information and confusion about how students are expected to act.

Method 3 - Prototyping with participants

In this method, the same participants as in the above phases had to perform two types of prototyping techniques. This method was carried out in a group room at Stockholm University. The project managers were divided into two roles: two moderators and one observer, where the undersigned was the observer. The moderators welcomed the participants and described the performance of the methods and their objectives.

 

The participants first wrote 1-2 scenarios individually. Then they shared their scenarios with the group and discussed them. The participants then used paper and pencil to sketch out their proposed solutions to the problems discussed in the previous methods. In order to create an interactive flow and make it easier to visualise the intended use, the application POP (created by the company Marvel) was also used. By photographing the sketches, these were entered into the app and they could link different images to each other. Some of the participants also created completely digital sketches in the app. 

 

Finally, after an introduction by the moderators, the participants got to use the prototyping tool figma. Participants used this tool to build simple digital prototypes.

Results

The results of this method were a number of scenarios and prototypes in the form of sketches and using digital tools. The scenarios revealed the participants’ intended future use of a digital solution/platform and the goals they wanted to achieve. Several of the participants expressed a desire for a simple platform that would have a clearer structure/layout than their current school platform. The functions that the participants wanted were these:

 

 

  • Course information where each course would have the same structure (reducing ambiguity and making it easier for students to navigate the platform and find information).
  • A function for mental illness where students can seek help when they need it. This should be clear on the website so that students can find it.
  • A social function with posters showing social activities for students. 

The sketches/prototypes provided a visual clarification of what the participants wanted in the future system. What the sketches and prototypes showed was that the participants envisioned a website/app that was easy to navigate with functions that were clearly visible so that students did not miss certain functions.

Method 4 - Evaluation

After we had developed prototypes based on the participants’ materials, these were then evaluated. The participants came together again to carry out an evaluation workshop, using the ‘critique in the design studio’ method. By presenting several different options of prototypes to their users, designers enable an easier evaluation process. Users can choose their favorite and justify it, as well as opt out of the options they would not want to use. Reflecting on and evaluating the work done is part of the mutual learning involved in participatory design.

 

The prototypes presented were a website and an application, both developed in the digital tool Figma. The purpose of the workshop was for the participants to evaluate which of these was most suitable for further development, as well as to extract other valuable criticism. After the presentations, the participants were asked to provide criticism and proposed solutions in the form of sketches.

Final result

A decision was made to narrow down and focus on promoting student well-being through a social platform, which participants considered a good idea. Some of the participants preferred only the prototype in the form of an app while other participants felt that both were necessary. They justified this by saying that an app is more accessible in terms of use and that it is “what most people use”, but a website creates a better overview due to its size. However, participants agreed that the app was the favourite.

 

Participants provided feedback such as necessary features to add, while others should be removed. There was also necessary feedback on shortcomings in the prototypes such as overlapping functions.