Define

Target Users

Talk About Depression organization aims to transform the way we communicate with friends about mental health to save lives and decrease social stigma. Two primary users are focused which are the people with depression and the people whose friends with depression.

User Research - Interview

To understand the target users in deep, we conducted a series of interviews on the people who report having a friend with depression or who has ever diagnose with depression. We interviewed a total of seven participants within three days, either in person or remotely.

There were three categories of questions we asked in the interview, which are:

1. The action the interviewee would take when they or their friend encounter depression attack

2. The depression related resources the interviewee knows or hear before

3. The steps interviewee would recommend for someone trying to get help for their depressed friends

   
   

Persona

To understand the target users in deep, we conducted a series of interviews on the people who report having a friend with depression or who has ever diagnose with depression. We interviewed a total of seven participants within three days, either in person or remotely.

Usability Testing

The participants experienced either high risk, medium risk, or low risk for task 1, and task 2 during the testing. 15 participants were randomly recruited and asked to participate in an in-person moderated usability testing.

Methods

30 minutes one-on-one session:

• Usability test

• Short interview

Behavioral measures:

• Completion time

• Task success rate

• Error rate

Results

Low Risk Without Friend

• Interview:

  All tasks completed successfully, no error, for navigation participant ‘a’ wanted an indicator to show that the screen would/could change on the screen to pick the level of the emergency (red, orange, yellow selection screen). Participant ‘a’ was also unsure as to what to do once it was clear the screen showed different things when moused over, at first it was thought she needed to read the descriptions to the depressed friend. Lastly, participant ‘a’ suggested having the about section located somewhere else, since it doesn’t seem to fit under the section, ‘how do I help.’

• Observation:

  All tasks completed successfully. For task 1, low emergency without a friend, participants spent a lot of time understanding how the high, medium, and the low-risk page worked. For task 2, non-emergency options, the participant had no trouble finishing the rest of the tasks.

Medium risk with friend

• Interview:

• 1. All tasks completed successfully.
  2. Participants spent the most time on differentiating the “high”, “medium”, and “low” risk paths.

• Observation:

• 1. The wording of “high”, “medium”, and “low” risks can be simplified.
  2. The advice cannot provide immediate help.

High risk with friend

• Interview:

• All tasks completed successfully, with no error. The participant was confused on the screen where they have to pick the level of emergency. The participant wasn’t able to find that it would have different options when they move the mouse over. Also, the participant didn’t know how to get to the next page because it was described more like a question, so she expects to have a “Yes” or “No” to click on.

• Observation:

• Participants felt confused about how the screen of emergency level work.

Redesign

Risk Levels

First Draft

Redesign

The Columbia protocol devides three different risk levels by the suicide intention and suicide plan. In order to allow users choose the correspondent situation fast, we devided the screen into three panels with different colors. Red represents high risk situations, orange represents medium situations (significant) risk, and yellow indicated low risk situations.

However,usability testing and interview shows that users don't know how to proceed to another step after reading the description. Besides that, the moused over effect may make users think they should read all of the descriptions on the different panels instead of clicking on the correspondent risk level to proceed to the next step.

New: Search by Professionals

New: Search by Locations

At the first draft, we followed the stakeholder's original idea that allows users to search services by "campus", "professionals", facilities", and "high school". However, some of the categories are overlapped. Therefore, in the redesign, we simplified the categories into two which are locations and professionals. This categories should be further examinated by card-sorting test.