WLU Weekly Wellness Check-In’s
A design solution to improve the wellness of students at Laurier.
Date: January 2022-April 2022
Role: Lead UX Researcher
Award: 1st place winner, Scotiabank Award
Team of 6
01 Empathize
Two user needs my team and I aimed to tackle based on 12 interviews conducted with Laurier students:
1. Students need to be reminded that their wellness should take priority in their studies to promote a healthy academic lifestyle.
2. Students need to become aware of the services available to them in a way that grabs their attention and feels more personal.
02 Conceptualize
Creating personas and journey maps allowed my team and I to further understand the user’s constraints and requirements. They visualize how a current experience may look for a Laurier student searching for wellness support and where their pain and pleasure points may lie.
Persona & Journey Map
My team and I consulted with Laurier professionals in the wellness field to decipher why students lack in using provided support systems, and where students lack wellness in their day-to-day lives. We discovered the “7 Pillars of Wellness.” These seven elements target where wellness lies within individuals, and in turn, give us an idea of the different ways students may be struggling
Speaking to Professionals
Once our conceptualization research was conducted, we were able to create our first iteration of our design solution. Our weekly wellness check-in’s appear on Laurier students’ online learning portal right before they sign in to their accounts. The survey is short, quick, and decipher’s each individual student’s main wellness area of struggle. By providing a list of relevant resources at the end of the survey, students have increased accessibility to wellness resources.
03 Design
My team and I created a low-fidelity prototype outlining how we envisioned our design to look, and began tests on our design solution.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
03 Test
Testing for our think-aloud protocols went smoothly, as participants were able to share their honest opinions about how they felt when interacting with our design. Some positive feedback we received was the intuitive UI. Participants felt comfortable navigating around the survey to pick the options they wanted. With all the positive feedback our team received, there were also many issues encountered. Most participants found the wording of many survey questions to be confusing and lacking clarity. With further information and iteration, we created our second version of our low fidelity prototype.
Think-Aloud Protocols
To measure success and failures, our group relied on a severity rating system which helped determine key issues with the design throughout the test. Task success relied on users' ability to navigate and complete their tasks with no errors. Each error encountered was given a severity rating ranging from low severity to high, the highest severity being a failure to complete the task. The results to the right demonstrate that majority of users found the survey to be overall easy, but there were still some areas of improvement as some users had troubles completing the tasks. Final touches and alterations allowed for the creation of the final prototype.
