Mental Wellbeing Guidance — a UX-fieldwork study
This project was focused on the process of conducting fieldwork. The objective was to learn how to perform quantitative and qualitative research in the form of surveys and interviews and to distill the findings of the research into insights to be used to deliver recommendations to a potential client.
Receiving a brief on the topic of self-control and mental health, presented me with a really exciting challenge. This is an area I always wanted to learn more about and I saw this as a great opportunity to explore the topic and hopefully come away with a better understanding of how users try to control their mental wellbeing in this ever-changing world.
The Challenge 💪
How might we create a behavior switching app that gives control?
The Process 🤺
The challenge lasted 4 weeks and focused on broad research with quantitative and qualitative data analysis that were synthesized into suggesting next steps.
The Target 🏹
We were provided with a brief consisting of a persona to focus our research on:
With my target group defined I established these needs, a series of assumptions about the users need for a change in behaviour regarding their mental health. Then I plotted them on a graph to determine the most important to focus on and to help write the hypotheses.
Hypothesis Generation 🪐
Based on the challenge at hand, my assumptions and the prioritisation of the needs, I created three different hypotheses about the users. The idea was to explore different areas of mental wellbeing and life balance:
Hypothesis 1: We believe users find it difficult to spend their time in meaningful ways.
Hypothesis 2: We believe users want to find a balance in life by investing less time in the digital space.
Hypothesis 3: We believe users want to overcome stress.
Quantitative Data 🚀
After generating the hypothesis, I started the process to validate my statements. The first step for me was to create an online survey that was distributed on social media and shared individually with users I thought fit the persona.
The participants were equally divided between male and female and had an age span between 28–36 that fitted the target group. The results showed that a majority of participants experienced stress in their everyday life. Where the most common were between 1–2 times a week.
The phone usage was divided across the board from everything of 30 minutes a day up to 6 hours a day. Keep in mind that the question didn't clarify if it was active or passive usage of the device.
A majority of the users addressed stress in their daily lifes as above average. However, the users did believe that they had enough time to spend on personal matters.
The effects of stress varied from user to user. The aggregated data shows that the most common effect of stress was the inability to rest and relax and that users experience Decreased efficiency and effectiveness.
Reflection: The inductive approach has its challenges, as it seeks to generalize based on a limited range of interviewees, as seen in this case. This is something I have been taking into consideration.
Discussion Guide ✨
The insights from the survey were analyzed and used as an additional input to design a discussion for further research with qualitative interviews. This helped me to sort out certain topics that were not meaningful to concentrate on within this research and allowed me to explore the topic in other directions. These questions were open-ended with subsequent follow-up questions.
The Interviews 👄
The interviews consisted of 5 individuals selected from the survey, who considered themselves to have a moderate to more than moderate stressful everyday life. Five users were interviewed; 3 males, 2 females aged between 28 and 36. Interview duration ranged from 25 minutes to 45 minutes. The interviews were recorded with Google Meet and then transcribed with a transcribing tool called Trint.
Affinity Mapping 📁
In order to unify large amounts of data into concept and ideas, I used affinity mapping. This allowed me to organize my findings from across the interviews and helped me to identify common issues. This is how I've done it:
- Collect key insights from interviews to sticky notes digitally.
- Cluster similar thoughts
- Name the clusters to different themes.
4. Step back and iterate.
5. Last of all describe what has been synthesized, such as insights, user needs and potential gaps that haven't been addressed yet.
Synthesis 🥂
The affinity mapping provided me with valid insights for each hypothesis. I then created principles that the stakeholders should follow when they explore the ideas at the next stage.
Insights 🍰
Several of my insights led to principles and recommendations to do workshops to explore ideas further. I decided to choose the most important insights and simplify my recommendations. The quotes represent shared voices across my qualitative interviews that I have interpreted to the following insights.
Hypothesis One
— We believe users find it difficult to spend their time in meaningful ways.
“I would like to to actually just have more time where I’m doing nothing or just do what I want, like go for a long hike or just see some television or spending a lot of hours reading in my book.” — User 3
Certain conditions for daily routines can make it hard for the users to get time to do what they want. Users need to be able to find more time to relax and see the importance of it. To put time aside for doing nothing, even when they have a busy schedule.
Principle One — Provide users with simple opportunities to achieve a mindful state?
Hypothesis Two
—We believe users want to find a balance in life by investing less time in the digital space.
“So I would say most of my usage goes to apps while listening to music, not so much to social media. I have deleted most of those apps or I delete them and then I go there that I download them for a day and to check on if anything happened, if somebody wrote me or whatever, and then I delete them in the most of the occasions again.”
— User 1
The users are trying to get in control of their devices in order to get more freetime and space in their daily lives. However, if they are doing too many limitations in their interaction with digital devices, it can become frustrating and potentially bounce back to instability and lack of control of their digital space. The user is in need of balance.
Principle Two — Provide relevant information about self-control to frequent phone users that are actionable?
Hypothesis Three
— We believe users want to overcome stress.
“I find it difficult to take in what the other people are telling me and asking me about. And when I find it difficult to manage the small things like making dinner, or viewing TV in the living room and some of those small, everyday things when they are starting to get difficult.”
— User 5
Users who have a stressful working life tend to take their stress home into their everyday life. After a long day at work, many of the users found that they could potentially take out their stress on their family and friends. There might be a risk that the work stress becomes home stress. This could potentially become at the expense of their families and relationships or even their health.
Principle Three — Prevent stress from occurring in everyday life for people that are experiencing stress in their career.
Additional insights — In addition to my initial hypotheses, several users addressed the importance of breathing in order to release their stress and become grounded when they arrive at home.
“Try to think about my breathing, maybe, which is not a very stressful thing, it’s a rather relaxing saying when you do Pilates or yoga, you concentrate on one movement maybe or maybe staying in one position and breathing. And that’s really calming.”
— User 1
This insight opens up the possibility to further explore how to create a smooth and easy navigation, a simple way to achieve a calm state that gives control for the user.
Next Steps 🧦
Going further with the challenge How might we create a behavior switching app that gives control in mind, I will recommend the following steps to be taken into consideration:
- How might we provide users with simple opportunities to achieve a mindful state?
- How might we provide relevant information about self-control to frequent phone users?
- How might we provide tools and recourses for users who want to overcome stress in their daily life?
These steps might consist of further research and user interviews around these three areas related to control, paired with a series of workshops and/or concept sessions with the stakeholders.
What did I learn? 🏊♂️
We got into the deep end of the pool and learned to swim. After going through this experience of basic principles of UX design I have learned a lot. We moved fast throughout the fieldwork weeks with workshops that tested and encouraged our creative mindsets.
I had some concerns about the brief due to the pandemic, especially regarding the matter of control. But the users did prove valid insights and show me that the challenge was still justifiable and useful during these testing times.
In order to have an even higher validity I would have liked to rely more on a triangulation method, there I would have compared semi-structured interviews with the surveys s to a larger extent in the synthesis and affinity diagram. However, would this require a larger set of data gathered from various sources.
This has been the first part of my journey exploring UX-Design as part of the “UX-designer upskill program” at Hyper Island. I feel that I’m off to a good start and I want to thank Martina Tranström for showing the way and for all the support.
