Safe Space
Use human-centered design techniques to fight the rising rate of teenage suicide in the Front Range area of Colorado.
CHALLENGE:
Work with a multidisciplinary team to develop a practical solution to a very real social problem - the shockingly high rate of teenage suicide in Colorado.
ACTION:
Through a series of design sprints, user interviews, and prototyping sessions, our team developed a mental well being service that targeted the social needs unique to teens growing up in Colorado.
OUTCOME:
Our prototype solution included a base smartphone app accompanied by a service for supporting teens. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but our team lacked the resources to develop the project beyond a prototype.
The Research Process
We began our research not with teens, but with the social systems and institutions that surround them We developed a list of stakeholders that we later arranged into a stakeholder map. We then re-arranged the stakeholder map to show how each stakeholder influenced other stakeholders on the map. One final rearrangement of the stakeholder map gave us clear paths of influence from left to right that could be used to demonstrate where changes to the system would make the biggest impact.
Our team then did interviews with potential users to better understand user needs. These needs, when combined with out impact gaps, gave us a clear direction for the project - How might we proactively implement structural changes within healthcare and educational institutions to reduce young adult suicide rates in the state of Colorado?
The Design Process
After understanding what the needs of out users were, we began the design process with a brainstorming session. We kicked off the session with crazy eights, a common ideation activity, but discovered that we all had similar ideas in mind. Through a couple more whiteboard brainstorming sessions, we were able to narrow down and combine our ideas into a handful of concepts to test.
Feedback on our concepts guided us towards a service that provided teens with self-guided support and learning. We created a series of storyboards to explore how such a service might look. To decide on which features to include in the final prototype, we posted our storyboards on a board and created a heat map of common features using stickies.
The Final Prototype
To demonstrate our concept, I developed a mock app using Invision Studio. The app included an initial setup survey to customize the experience to the user, as well as several features including access to healthcare professionals, scheduling features, 'panic button' access to emergency contacts and suicide prevention hotlines, resources for mental wellness, and suggestions for geographic 'spaces' for teens to explore. The prototype app was then uploaded to the cloud so test users could download it and demo it as if it were a real app.
After testing and refining the prototype internally with team members, I enlisted the help of one other team member to conduct user testing with real Colorado teens. The 'spaces' in particular were a hit with teens who, growing up in Colorado, loved exploring outside but felt 'trapped' in a 'bubble' of places they were familiar with.
Though feedback for the project was positive, our team ultimately lacked the time and resources to continue with the project beyond the prototype stage.
Project Photo Gallery
Screenshots of how the app would appear to users opening it for the first time.