Helping hand is a mental health app for elementary school children in grades 3-6th. With COVID-19 effecting children both physically and mentally, something to help teachers and parents keep track of their students mental health, along with their heart beat will give both parties insight on how to assist in helping their children cope with the new changes.
The global pandemic has put a lot of restrictions on certain aspects of life. For children especially, the pandemic has not only affected their social lives but their schooling as well. These changes may be hard to understand and can have a drastic effect on their development as they grow up. Parents and teachers of these children can find it hard to understand how the child is feeling, and might find it even harder to have the child talk about their feelings.
Create a cross platform mental health tracker that would provide a fun and interactive watch and application to help parents and teachers track the heart rate/emotions of their child while in school. The purpose is to know when a child is feeling upset so that the issue may be resolved, and their mental health will be improved.
Help parents catch emotional distress in their children easier than normal. Whether that's done by the child being honest with their parents or the teacher catching onto issues, having an application that visualizes a childs mental state will help adults understand them better in these confusing times.
Me, Chris and Anna decided that for this project we would split the work three ways. I would handle performing interviews for the parents, Chris would handle the interviews for the teachers and Anna would perform interviews for the children.
When we first introduced our survey we were looking into how the pandemic was effecting students mentally and emotionally. While attempting to gather data around the effect the pandemic had on the quality of communication in the education system a different problem was found through parents mentioning their children's ability to keep up with online classes.
From our 40 participant survey we learend that parents aren't satisfied with the service teachers are providing.
They notice their children are distressed with the new development of online classes.
They're worried for their childs social development while not being around other children.
"All of this stay at home schooling is ruining his (Her son) social life. I notice it, he's starting to get really easily irritated and moody."
"These teachers have no idea how to handle teaching a class of twenty 8 year olds. They're incredibly unhelpful."
"I need to stand over her (Her daughter) to make sure she's paying attention. It's really irritating especially cause I've got work of my own to do. But what else can I do? She's in second grade she's not gonna just sit there."
Three elements were emphasized when I was creating the sketches. A rating system parents can utilize to rate how their child feels that day, a schedule that shows moments in time where her childs BPM spiked, the ability to click on that spike to see the time and subject that child was participating in at that moment.
I tested the paper prototype with 5 different parents. Four mothers and one father.
"Oh, I didn't get that the bubble meant their BPM was high."
Something that was difficult for users to understand was how to utilize buttons on the weekly calander screen. Overall for the design we expressed wanting to have a bubble design to reflect the watches that the sudents would use in class, but it only caused confusion. The concept of the bubbles being bigger the higher the BPM at that moment was scrapped, as it would also cause cramping when BPM spikes were close to eachother within the hour.
"I wanna message the teacher about this, can I?"
I got two parents to mention the idea of a messaging system within the app so that they don't have to dig for the teachers email. This we found would be a great way for the teacher to categorize messages. Concerns for a students mental health being designated to one place would help prevent miscommunication.
We saw that our user for the most part liked the idea of the bubble design, but just didn't like how it was implimented at that moment, so we tried to keep it within the BPM screen to the left. Sadly this style across the board made it difficult for the users to understand what exactly the information in the bubble represented. It was difficult to add text to the bubbles aswell with out making the entire screen give information overload.
I also tried to incoporate blue and green as those are the colors we used for out personas, but it was way more incoporation than what my partners intended, so I went back to re-desgin it and keep it to a blueish- purple.
The emotion rating system still doesn't feel thurough enough to accuratly capture the childrens emotions. Through out the project I was getting feedback that not only was it not thurough enough, but the design of the emjois were consistantly not professional enough. The idea of why there even needs to be emojis there is a concept that I might rework, as the parents don't need to see emojis. The app shouldn't have a playful aesthetic for the view of the parents the same way it should on the watch.
I took inspiration from most social media direct messaging elements, but to keep things more professional and organized it might need to be reworked to refelct a email format.
There is some information that can be added to the BPM anylitics page, such as what the child was feeling at that moment in time, what subject they were in and how much they were participating in the lesson.
Even though my partner had a part time job at a daycare, it was difficult for her to gather data and conduct interviews because of the permission needed from their parents. It's important to remain ethical when dealing with children, and to not put them in any situation where a line of questioning can distress them.
My origional low fidelity comps were incredibly saturated and distracting. This taught me to not only keep a few priorities on one screen, but that animations are pretty in theory, but will distract your user.
This was my second time working with a team of ux/ui designers. This time around we all utilized our recources and skill sets to find data based on our life experiences. I used my mothers profession as a nurse to seek out mothers who were in tough situations because of their intense work scheduel and children's home schooling. Anna used her job as a daycare worker to help find insite on how children are feeling and Chris' father is a teacher, so he handled interviews for them.
