PsychoResile

Overview

Duration: 2 month Individual Project

PsychoResile app enable university students to have mental "positive adaptation" after stressful or adverse situations

Psychological resilience: the ability to mentally or emotionally cope with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly.

Background

A total of 6,479 students participated in the study with sociodemographic generally consistent with the university population. The estimated prevalence for mental health problems was 19.2% with 67.4% reporting subsyndrome symptoms. The extremely high prevalence of mental health problems in university students provides evidence for this being an at-risk population. including having a relatively low psychological resilience, which means the ability to cope with a crisis mentally or emotionally or to return to pre-crisis status quickly

Competitive Analysis:

Currently, the online psychological therapy list and university psychiatry clinic are the 2 major options that offer students various approaches to resolve their psychological problems, including enhancing the psychological resilience, both of them has their advantages and disadvantages which has been listed as below.

Online Psychological therapy list:

Lack of community. For I have looked into 3 online psychologic therapy applications, they don’t have certain online community for students to communicate and attains help from each other .

Lack of Hierarchy. They are deficiency to Hierarchy, for students with different psychological needs are not able to get corresponded therapy

Lack of motivation. They are lack of stimulations, students won’t have enough motivation to enhance their psychological resilience besides when they have to

university psychiatry clinic:

Crowded and disorienting. It was generally need appointment to see the psychological doctor, however, it is believed that some situations are unexpected and it is urgent for students to seek help sometimes

Untrusted: sometimes students would not like to share something deep in their mind to some therapist that they have never known

User interview

For I have talked to 6 university students about the difficulties they used to have and how they get over them.

**Talk to friends help.** After difficulties occur, talking about the difficulties with friends or someone they trust help them to step into further step, also could enhance their psychological resilience.
**Could not think objectively.** Some students are not able to think objectively after the difficulties happen, which negatively affects their reaction and emotion while facing the difficulties next time.
**Not willing to talk about it.** Some students believes that talking about their difficulties with others will negatively affect their emotion and feeling.
**Do not want to talk to professional therapist.** Students have bias on professional therapist, for some of them think certain therapy is useless, and sometimes feel difficult to connect with them

Problem Statement

Objective thinking& emotion detachment. Students are always immersed in sadness and not able to think objectively while facing the difficulties, which has negative influence on their psychological resilience

Enable to talk with friends and others. Some students are not willing to talk about their difficulties with other people since they feel they will bring other people with negative emotion

Raise awareness of CBT. Raise the awareness of certain mental problems and have a better understanding of CBT

Deficiency of motivation. Due to several reasons, students are lack of motivation to move to the further step of enhancing their psychological resilience

Ideation

For resolving the problem, I have 3 design objectives that would like to achieve.

Enable students practice detaching their emotion and thinking objectively while facing the difficulty
Provide them with motivation of enhancing their psychological resilience
Provide students with an easy approach of talking to their friends while facing the difficulty

I started thinking from students’ journey of facing the difficulties and how do difficulties affect the psychological resilience.

From user journey map, the gap of emotion variation between the point of difficulty comes and external affects could be regarded as the first design opportunity, I tend to create an **more accessible approach** for student to talk to someone they trust while the difficulty comes to them. Besides, the point of internal process after external affect could be the second design opportunity, for students will have chance to practice their ability of detaching the emotion and thinking objectively right after either talking to their friends or difficulty happen, since the moment of walking out of the negative emotion could be regarded as students’ **best motivating moment** of practicing to have a better psychological resilience. Moreover, to help students build a deeper connection with someone they trust before difficulty comes that enable them to willing to talk with their friends while the difficulty comes.
**Design Solution. An app that enable to talk to someone they trust more accessibly while difficulty is coming, also could practice their ability of detaching emotion and thinking objectively**
Then I started to build the information architecture and the wireframe, after several rounds of iteration, the outcome is shown as below.

Prototype

From there, I condensed and combined the ideas I generated into 3 main features which I took to prototyped at higher fidelity, as explained below.

Overall result

Finally, PsychoResile is presented to some of my classmates and roommates for conducting user tastings. During the process, some problems are stated, such as it is hard for some users to see their achievement of comfort zone challenge by clicking the original comfort zone card. Besides, in “build you group” part in “my group” section, the original size of portrait is not visible enough for to tell users that they are able to check their members’ information by clicking on it.

In addition, here’s some positive feedback from the users. For instance, it is considered by one of my classmates as a really good platform to remind students of people that mean a lot them and ask them for help. Furthermore, one of my roommates think it is appropriate for conducting the practices of psychological resilience after talking with friends.

Reflection

Think about scenario for users and always think about how to connect the design solutions with users’ journey map.