Zen Zone
Zen Zone provides students with all the resources they need to manage their mental health for free and in one location
✴ Project Overview
Zen Zone is an app designed specifically for college students seeking resources and support for mental health. With Zen Zone, users are able to track their moods, join communities with others facing similar challenges, refer a friend anonymously, and receive personalized suggestions for coping mechanisms such as meditations, yoga videos, or articles. Our goal with Zen Zone is to provide students with all the resources they need to manage their mental health for free and in one location.
✴ My Role
Project type:
Industry:
Timeline:
Tools
Category:
Responsibilities:
Human Centered Computing
Mental Health
3 months
Figma, Miro Board, Data Mining
UX Research, UX Design
UX Designer, UX Researcher
✴ Problem Statement
❓ Problem
College students are struggling with mental health and don’t have easy access to resources
💡 Solution
A free digital platform dedicated to enhancing the mental well-being of college students
✴ Data Mining
Our team split up into four separate subreddits: 'Anxiety', 'Zoloft', 'Stress', 'Mental Health Apps'. Each one of us scraped data from Reddit and put our comments together.
Overall Corpus Stats
How many comments were in the corpus: 984
How many posts: 260
How many post authors: 390
How many comment authors: 390
Major Takeaways
Sufficient weight loss / gain in people who took antidepressants or who were struggling with their mental health, specifically with panic attacks and anxiety
People strongly dislike mental health apps due to them not being about to talk to real people
Many users expressed their frustration with pricing of many mental health apps
People have frustration with mental health resources in general
Tasks Integrations
Focusing on natural supplements rather than harmful antidepressant recommendations
Prioritizing the user wanting to remain anonymous about their personal information
Understanding that many users want the application to be free and no additional charges after they download it.
✴ Card Sorting Study
Zen Zone will give college students the opportunity to see the improvement of their mood and mental health using tabs like Home, Account, Message, and Statistics. In order to organize our thoughts and the elements of the application, we asked our subjects to use a hybrid card sorting system, Optimal Workshop. We wanted to learn about potential different categories we could incorporate into our prototypes.
✴ Wizard of Oz Protocol
The objective of this user study was to evaluate the usability and user experience of a low-fidelity paper prototype that helps college students have an accessible leeway for mental health. This study helped identify potential usability issues, user preferences, and areas for improvement in the design of our app. From observing the participant, we noted that the lack of screens was very confusing to the user and also for the facilitator. To improve this I made more screens that would give a easier user flow. There needed to be a path for every single situation and it did not show in our paper prototype.
