Summary

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Case Study

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Project Brief

The aim of this project is to “acquire and apply practical skills in designing and prototyping interactive products and services, and to understand and apply principles of graphical user interface and interaction design”.

The Problem

A major mental health issue faced within the workforce today is the gradual onset of burnout.

The Goal

Our goal is to raise awareness of burnout especially for HSC students as well as preventing it by proposing an appropriate strategy, which is carried out as an app to help students reduce the stress levels that cause burnout, together with guiding them through the aspects of priorities they need while going through the HSC.

Team and Role

I worked on this project with two other students studying user experience design:

- Brendan Yang

- Jenny Kim

I was involved with all stages of the design process, mainly focusing my efforts on the research phase and the user interface designs.

Responsibilities

Secondary Qualitative Research, Screen Designs, User Testing, Video Production.

The Process

My process will be different in different projects and will be determined by many factors such as the project goals, business needs, complexity of the problem, time, etc. Here I used the double diamond approach.

Double Diamond

Double Diamond Approach

Discovery

Research

Burnout is a commonly know issue which found both in the work force and in learning environments and is most often caused by overworking yourself. The NSW Board of Studies forums have come to recognise burnout as a common occurrence amongst HSC students and describe it as “when you are emotionally and physically pushed to the limit of collapse” (“The student guide to study burnout", 2014). According to Maslach and Leiter (2016), the effects of burnout include exhaustion, cynicism, professional inefficiency, emotional and interpersonal stress, mental health issues and a negative outlook on life.

Problem Scenario

Burnout within youths studying the HSC became the focus problem scenario due to the lack of research towards effective solutions towards prevention and recovery of burnout. For most students, burnout is a part of study life, but the potential ramifications can have long lasting effects. Thus, the target audience became high school students studying for the HSC.

Methods

In order to successfully conduct primary research, design methods must be purposefully selected in order to obtain useful insights into the problem area. We chose to run an initial questionnaire with the purpose of gaining a general insight into the target audience’s current experiences. The data collected would later guide our focus in the interview sessions. Once completed, we began conducting interviews which were designed to elaborate further and provide deeper insights into the current experience of burnout. We used the following questions to guide our research:

  • 1. How does HSC burnout effect schooling abilities?
  • 2. How does burnout effect one’s social life and or events outside of study?
  • 3. Does burnout have a lasting effect on one’s life? If so, how?
  • 4. How does burnout effect one’s physical health?
Key Findings

During the primary research phase, a few key insights arose from both the interviews and the questionnaires. We used affinity diagrams to collate and organise the data collected from the interviews.

Findings #1
Findings #2
Findings #3

Reframe

Personas

Using the data from the Discovery phase, we developed two unique personas. These were used to define our target audience more clearly. The first portrays the life of a university student resenting the effects of burnout from his HSC years and the second, a current HSC student struggling to keep up with the workload despite suffering from burnout.

Persona 1 Persona 2
Storyboard

To better understand the current experience of our personas during their HSC exams, we created a storyboard. This visual representation enables us to gauge the current perspective and evaluate early concepts towards the future design solution.

Storyboard

Ideation

Methods

With a clear understanding of the problem space, we brainstormed nine ideas which we later narrowed down to three using a decision matrix. Brainwriting 6-3-5 helped expand and improve on the three concepts enabling us to develop simple use case and a user journey map for each.

Storyboard

Decision Matrix

Rationale

Ultimately, we decided to pursue and focus on the development of a personal planner to address the problem of burnout among HSC students. This was due to the high accessibility of the application for students compared to the other options, an intended stress-free and time efficient experience, a means to promote the awareness of the problem, the age-appropriateness of the design and the resulting productivity of the idea.

Prototyping

User Journey Flow

We developed a user journey flow to map out what the user’s interaction path could potentially be. Multiple iterations were created, each one being improved with user feedback. Below is the final version for the high-fidelity mock-up.

Storyboard
Wireframe

Using the user journey flow, we created a series of screens to cover all the activities performed by the user and then organised the screen designs into a wireframe. This allowed us to establish a basic concept idea of how each screen connects to the other screens and what they could potentially look like.

Storyboard
Low Fidelity

Using the screen designs developed from for the wireframe, a paper prototype was quickly developed and tested with potential users. A think aloud approach was used to understand the thought process of the user and helped us identify issues with the current screen designs.

High Fidelity

The insights collected from the low fidelity prototyping allowed us to make purposeful alterations to the screen designs which was then developed digitally using Figma. A second round of user testing with the think aloud approach was conducted, and further alterations were made.

High Fidelity

Promotional Video

Things I Learnt
  • Ability to apply a user-centric design process that includes research, grounding (analysis) and concept generation (synthesis) as well as validation (evaluation)
  • Lo-fi prototyping skills across multiple interaction modalities, including desktop-based, mobile, and tangible interfaces with an emphasis on sketching as a design method
  • Group-based design experience through collaboration