Bean - "How Ya Bean?"
Lead Researcher
An AI tool to provide an inexpensive and quick alternative mental health solution for college students to improve time management and promote self-growth.
Prototype:
Bean – “How Ya Bean?”
Goal: To provide an inexpensive and quick alternative solution for college students that suffer from mental health issues but are unable to get help they need due to lack of time and cost. This project was a challenge from IBM to create a mental health app for college students using AI as one of the main features.
Client: IBM
Project Type: Mobile Application
Tool: Figma
Project date: Aug 2023 – Dec 2023
Roles
Lead Researcher – lead primary and secondary research for the project. Helped the team better understand the mental health crisis and goals for this mobile app
Design and Development support – help Design & Development Leads wireframe and design prototype.
Project Summary
There is a mental health crisis in the United States and a growing demand for mental health services. Nearly 56% of Americans are seeking or wanting to seek mental health services for themselves or others but, these individuals are mostly young and have a low income. Specifically, college students face many mental health problems as the majority must handle work, school, and relationships.
Based on our team’s research, several college students either suffer from anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies, eating disorders, substance abuse, or all three. Most college students refused to seek help due to their pride, lack of knowledge, cost, or the fear of the unknown. One of the biggest issues that stop college students from seeking help is trust. Trust is a known motivation for knowledge sharing and it can influence the willingness to share information with another person or entity; in this case, it would be AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Continuing from our research, college students are more likely to engage in cooperative behavior among those they consider friends. Emojis help increase trust between friends as well.
About BEAN
Bean is a quick and easy solution for college students to solve temporary mental health problems by providing self-help strategies, journaling their thoughts, and better understanding their emotions with the app’s iconic AI character, Bean! Bean provides comfort for those who wants to improve their mental health but lack time and money to do so. Bean is NOT a professional solution to solving severe mental health issues, but it helps our audience better understand what they are feeling and gives quick solutions to ease their issues.
Specific problem: Designing a mental health app for college students who suffer from any forms of mental illnesses or decaying mental health.
User needs:
Quick – most college students lack time to take care of their mental health and thus causing the rise of mental health issues among the demographic
Inexpensive - college students already have a lot they must pay for such as tuition and housing. If we are making an app for college students, the app should be inexpensive but also provides the help our users need.
Main Challenge BEAN tackled: Increasing user’s trust towards AI
Trust played a big factor when developing this app. From our research, many students stated that they do not trust AI as much due to its negative connotations and data security. They also refuse to share problems and issues they are facing because of the fear of being judged or looked down upon which is why most college students would rather trust friends/loved ones rather than a professional therapist. Thus, we tried to create a solution where users can feel as if they are talking to a trusted friend, which is BEAN! With AI being involved, we made sure to be transparent to the users to increase their trust with the company as well.
Method/process: Affinity diagrams, in-class discussions, and brainstorming to ideate possible features and better understand our target audience.
3 Main Features
Home Screen Widget - Users can customize personalized widgets in which they can track their tasks, their daily mood, provide daily inspirational messages, and more.
Journaling/Self-help strategies - Users can write, type, or voice record in their journal to keep track of the emotions they at any time that best suits the user.
Daily mood check-ins/Task generator - Users can quickly track their moods and emotions that they are feeling throughout the day.
Reflection
This project taught me a lot about how to work as a team to overcome disagreements, better understand best UI practices, and overall work in a UX sprint.
1. Overcoming team disagreements
There were several disagreements within our team regarding features and overall design of the app. There were several miscommunications about the top 3 features and their functions to help users. Most of our team were gone or missing meetups due to other conflicts and thus miscommunication arose. However, we continued to keep each other updated and calmly explain how each function works to each other from our own perspective. With this, we as a team were able to resolve this issue and keep each other updated. Another challenge that we faced were color choices. There were a lot of disagreements about what colors to use and how to implement them into our design. The biggest struggle was creating the color palette since we were trying to create a warm yet calming palette but everyone on the team wanted different colors. We resolved this issue by researching more about colors and their psychological effects. We also tried different color variations and finally came to a solution which was our final design!
2. Understand best UI Practices
There was a challenge in trying to create an app that is unique when it comes to its features and UI. Most of our app was following basic UI practices however, our team got stuck on task creation and how to implement that feature. One amazing opportunity that our team had was that our app design was reviewed by UX professionals. Since I am a current UX Intern at Bath and Body Works, my UX team was kind enough to review this app and provide design feedback to my team. They helped us better understand certain UX patterns found in mobile design and explained how it benefits the user experience when they go thorough the app. With the feedback they provided, our team were able to come into a compromise to utilize best UI practices over uniqueness for users to easily understand and use with ease.
3. UX Sprint work
As a current UX intern, this was not my first time doing a UX sprint. However, this was project was my first time being a leader for the team to continue to move the sprint forward. I was appointed to the Lead Researcher for this sprint and was tasked with making sure the data and research we’ve done was organized and understandable to our audience. Although research is not my expertise, I decided to take on this role to challenge myself and grow my skills as a researcher. As a UX designer, we are always researching and learning new information and thus, I wanted to better understand how to conduct surveys, interviews, and gather information to help the team create and develop the application or website. As a lead researcher, I learned a lot about user research and how it helps design creation.