Design Practice in Human-Centered Design and Development

Mind Map

August 2023 - December 2023

Mental health is one of the largest issues that face our society. Everyone struggles in their own way and many can often feel isolated and alone.

MindMap is a mental health hub that offers community and resources to those struggling. It helps users navigate their thoughts and feelings as well as take action to help aid their struggles.

I worked alongside my group to create this prototype. We worked through the stages of the design thinking model to empathize with the user, define a problem, ideate a solution, prototype, and then test.

Ethnography:

We conducted a video ethnography where we selected a video of someone discussing their struggles with mental health. I studied a woman with OCD and how she lives her life. I took notes on certain things she struggles with and ways she helps herself. This helps understand the problem space as well as the user’s goals and needs.

Empathize Stage

Problem Scenarios:

We wrote a scenario about a student in college struggling with mental health, including details about a day in their life. This gave us a concrete example to help us understand where the application could potentially fit into a user’s life, as well as certain user needs the app needs to address.

Stakeholder Analysis:

We made a list of potential stakeholders and ranked their power, legitimacy, and urgency. We then wrote their evaluation criteria for what they would want to see from the application (reliability, effectiveness, availability) and what we would do to achieve it.

Define Stage

Scrum User Stories:

We created user stories to define users/stakeholders, their needs, and how they could benefit from the application.

 

Use Case Diagram:

We created a use case diagram, showing our system boundaries and the functionalities, such as a chat forum, journal, and therapist finder.

 

Ideate Stage

Story Boards:

We created storyboards showing our product in context with the user.

 

We created a style guide and used Figma to make our uniform, interactive prototype.

Figma Link

 

Prototype Stage

My main role in designing the prototype was the chat forum. The chat forum allows users to anonymously join groups that relate to them. It is meant to give users support, give them a platform to support others, and let them know that they are not alone.

Test Stage

Guided Cognitive Walkthrough:

We created scripts and walked different users through our prototype while they shared their feedback.