Guppy
Guppy is an app that helps first year college students by providing access to mental health materials on campus and providing a peer to peer experience for those that feel more comfortable talking to others about their problems.
This Project Is a Work in Progress
The Problem
Being a first year college student is stressful and being in a new environment with new people can add anxiety.
For this project I was in a team with 3 other design students.
Eddie Bukirch
Courtney DiDomenico
Adam Missbah
Isaiah Walker (ME)
Our Design Process
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Interviews
Conducted interviews with students and faculty on campus.
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Empathy Building
Created empathy with all of our finding from the interview process.
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Ideate
Brainstormed and created different ideas to solve the problems on campus.
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Test
Tested our ideas with actual student feedback.
Interviews
Collectively we conducted interviews with over 60 interviews with students and faculty on campus. This was Important to us because we needed to understand how the students and faculties view of mental health resources and if they were accessible for the first-year students.
Interview Location
Wentworth Institute of Technology
Boston area in general
Northeastern University
Target Age
17-24 (college students)
Any age for professionals on campus
Interview Questions
1. Do you feel like first year students are aware of the support resources on campus?
2. What are the support resources that Wentworth offers?
3. Is there a big difference between a students first day of high school and their first day of college?
4. If a student comes to you with a mental health problem, what would you recommend to them?
5. Tell me a time when a student came to you with a problem about accessing materials (Daily meals, Books, Commuting pass), How did you handle the situation?
6. Do you feel that Wentworth does a good job at acclimating first year students?
7. Tell me a time when you did something for the first time?
We Met...
Kat, a 20 year old student from MassArt studying illustration
Christopher Scanlon, the Associate Director of The Center for Student Engagement.
JK, 22, Civil Engineering Major, WIT
We Were amazed to realize…
Kat has an insane schedule that prevents her from seeing her therapist, and her school counselors aren't much help.
Chris is currently working to add more suicide awareness resources here on campus.
JK went into the Wellness Office to find someone to talk to on a bi-weekly basis and they gave him a website to go to and said "find a psychiatrist here."
I wonder if this means…
If Kat had more time or resources to attend to herself, if she would.
If Chris had more suicide awareness around the campus would this make the students feel more comfortable on campus.
If JK would have been felt more helped if Wentworth had better resources for long-term care on campus.
Empathy Building - Persona
Meet Ami!
A 21 year old college student with a lack of support system who needs to feel heard.
Need: A way to avoid stigma while also getting the help she needs.
Because: She does not have a strong sense of self awareness, therefore she cannot represent herself. She doesn't know how to get help without compromising her privacy.
We wanted to understand Ami’s Pains and Gains before we started ideating. This process helped us understand our personas day to day life and the services she needs to have a more supportive college career.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
How Might We
SET EXPECTASTIONS FOR NOVICE USERS WHILE MAINTAINING AN ANONOYMOUS EXPERIENCE?
Testing #1 “Graffiti Anonymous”
We Believed:
We need to take advantage of the amount of feedback we got in the elevators. We will get better feedback if the prompts are more guided and not completely open ended.
To Verify that, We Will:
To verify that we will hang "Graffiti Anonymous" posters on the walls of different spaces on campus.
We Measured:
Our quantitative data through the number of items posted at each of the different locations and then preform a comparative analysis.
Therefore We Will:
There will be a higher number of items posted in areas that are less populated and a lower number of items posted in areas that are more populated (neg. correlation).
What We Reallized From “Graffiti Anonymous”
We Believed:
People would respond to "Graffiti Anonymous" postings more in less populated places than in more populated places.
We Observed:
The Hawthorne Effect and the Bystander Effect came into play. This was very dependent on the locations where the posters were hung
We Learned:
We learned that we need to have posters in a place that is private yet still monitored in order to get the right type of conversation.
Therefore We Will:
Post GA posters with prompts on them: post in elevators & help offices (Start a conversation about: 1. FITB, 2. Health, 3. Mental Health)
