U-Space
A mobile application designed to bridge University of Toronto students with Health and Wellness activities and spaces while connecting them with like-minded peers.
MyESS Cover Page showing screens of two different devices

Role

Conducted User Research, Wireframe Sketches on Figma,
Prototyped Product and Created Demo,
Led Visual Design Direction,
Conducted Usability Testing

Project Duration

2 months (October to December 2022)

Team Members

Me
Arielle Styrsky
Jennifer Hillhouse
Sawyer Neame
Shaochenzi Wang
Shifan Sun

Tools Used

Figma, Figjam, Miro, Google Forms
Connecting students to the Health & Wellness support they need.
01
Briefing
About the Project
This project is a collaborative effort with UofT's Innovation Hub, bringing the cutting-edge resources and innovative solutions to enhance the well-being and community experience of University of Toronto students. “U-Space” is the result of this partnership, designed to empower students with the tools they need to thrive both academically and personally.
Problem
In a 2019 report by the University of Toronto's Innovation Hub, it was highlighted that UofT students tend to prioritize grades over other success indicators. While the Health and Wellness division (HWC) aims to offer extensive support, it unintentionally contributes to a campus culture of overwork, resulting in limited resource utilization and challenges for proactive help-seekers.
Goal
To connect students to the Health and Wellness support they need and come up with a fresh and creative approach that will both promote existing UofT health & wellness services, as well as help students develop self-coping skills and practices needed to improve their mental health.
Solution
A mobile application designed to revolutionize the well-being and sense of community among University of Toronto students. With a range of innovative features, it ensures that students can seamlessly integrate health and wellness practices into their busy academic schedules while connecting with like-minded peers.
Project Timeline
Our project lasted over a two-month period, and we divided the process into 4 sprints. I took the lead in overseeing Sprints 2 and 3, leveraging my experience in visual designing user interfaces, wireframing, sketching, and prototyping. This role allowed me to contribute my expertise to the development process and ensure the effective execution of these crucial project phases.
02
discovering
What is preventing students from accessing Health & Wellness Services?
We sent out 28 surveys to different students to understand the challenges and motivations of their attitudes and behaviours towards H&W services at UofT. We also interviewed 6 students and conducted 1 focus group with four students to learn about their experiences with university health and wellness services. Here are some statistics we found through our primary research.
75%
do not find Health & Wellness services and support effective.
61%
students have never used health and wellness services.
54%
feel confused with the navigation on the Student Life Website.
From the semi-structured interviews and focus groups, students expressed:

The conversations that we had also helped establish a deeper understanding of student’s experiences with Health & Wellness at UofT.

“Does UofT even address Health & Wellness? I didn’t know there were resources.”
“I was waiting everyday to get a call for my first intake appointment”.
“Living off of campus makes it impossible to attend a service since the only times they offered the service I need was during class or early into the day”
“I have troubles finding specific services and workshops on their website, so I end up Googling it instead.”
“It’s hard for me to attend a meditation session because I don’t have many friends that would be interested in going with me.”
"The website to find UofT's complete list of Health & Wellness services are too hard to find and navigate."
03
defining
Meet Nell, the Newbie. A first-year student who is new to campus.

Using the gather results of our research, we created a persona that represents the needs, desires, goals, and obstacles students encounter when seeking support for their health and wellness.

Our persona, Nell, spends long hours commuting to campus. Her being new to campus with an introverted personality, she wants to look for a peer support network to aid with her mental wellbeing.

Journey mapping how Nell accesses H&W resources.
Taking the themes from the research findings, I led the created a journey map was created to understand the process of how Nell would access and practice Health and Wellness resources on campus.

We determined that for UofT students, help-seeking is a process that involves several steps: from choosing whether to seek assistance to navigating available resources to actually using services and the results of using them. Students’ experiences can be affected and influenced by both internal and external factors at each step.
What Nell (or most UofT student) needs...
From our gathered insights and scenarios, I developed four design goals to help ensure our design decisions would be grounded in our user research and solve the problem.
04
developing
Brainstorming ideas and prioritizing them.
As a team, I actively led in brainstorming a diverse array of ideas aimed at enhancing Nell's situation. Collaboratively assessing each solution's impact and feasibility, we collectively voted to prioritize and refine the most promising concepts.

Combining Every Idea Together

In the collaborative process of converging ideas as a group, I ensured our proposed solution aligned with features directly addressed and solved the identified pain points and needs of the users. This ensured the final product not only met design objectives but also effectively catered to users' well-being concerns, empowering students to monitor and enhance their mental, physical, and social well-being through routine check-ins.

Low-fidelity sketching

I led the team by sketching the check-in flow, proposing users receive mobile notifications directing them to mood check screens in the app. I also designed the activity flow, enabling users to book on-campus Health and Wellness activities and connect with peers through campus communities. Additionally, I visualized features for users to track trends in their Health & Wellness activities, fostering engagement by creating challenges within the app.

Conducting a Lean Evaluation.

Using a mix of methods: 5-second test and think-a-loud to conduct lean evaluation for usability feedback and improvements. I recruited 4 participants (2 graduate students + 2 undergraduate student) attending the UofT. The participants were each shown a specific task flow and asked to complete a set of instructions.

Task 1 - Shown sketches for 5-seconds and asked the key features.
Task 2 - Explain out loud the thought process to perform the task.
Participants were able to correctly identify that this app was Health & Wellness related.
All participants Correctly identified target users were for post-secondary students.
Participants expressed feeling overwhelmed with the amount of information on the screens.
All participants Correctly identified target users were for post-secondary students.
Making Updates to the Screens.

From the feedback that I gathered from the lean evaluation, I made changes to our mid-fidelity prototypes. Below are a few example screens that had the most significant changes. Based on our evaluations, I refined our designs and created the mid-fidelity prototype. I was in charge of unifying everyone’s screen designs to ensure that all screens were cohesive with the same visual style and system.

Phone with 2 screens
Before
Check-in screen felt lengthy as there were too many steps and buttons. Participants also expressed that the emoticons also were not representing enough.
After
Reduced clutter by removing emotions button tags and feelings options, and simplified interface by only including emojis as initial mood check-in. Emoticons were also changed to show a better spectrum of moods.
Before
It was unclear how to sign up for a specific event due to the lack of information hierarchy, and was confused between “Book now” or “Join” to enrol.
After
Creating a Netflix style grid of different events and activities and when the user selects a specific card of interest, it takes them to a screen with only details of the event/ activity and one button to “Reserve a spot”.
Before
Participants were very uncomfortable with the idea of messaging a stranger and expressed that they didn’t like the initiating a direct message one-to-one.
After
Removed the direct random messaging chats, instead once an individual has booked their event (i.e., Yoga) they will have a group chat taken to a group chat where attendees can ask questions or discuss the activity.
05
Delivering
Reviewing Activity Progresses
The user is prompted with a reminder to review their health and wellness activity and goals as well as motivate others along the user’s journey.
User Flow with 4 screens
Gentle Daily Check-Ins
Check-in flow that reminds user to check-in based on the their current emotions and feelings. They are able to record their thoughts and also be shown a history of their entries.
Discovering Nearby Events
This flow shows the process of finding activities of interest. Users are provided with self-practice guides, meeting like-minded people, and also share their discoveries with others.
Finding Campus Buddies
Users can establish a stronger peer support community through completing Health and wellness challenges and activities to motivate each other for individual  improvement.
06
Testing
What features could we improve on?
Using our mid-fidelity clickable prototype, I conducted another round of usability tests with 4 participants and for each user testing task we measured time on task, completion rate, and errors to assess the usability of our prototype. I also asked a set of follow-up questions.  
100%
Completion Rate
1m.12s
Average Time Spent on Check-In Flow
1m.33s
Average Time Spent on
Discover Flow
2m.58s
Average Time Spent on
Buddies Flow
Positive Notes
All tasks were completed by all participants (100% task completion rate) indicating that our flows made enough sense to get to completion. The check-in flow and discover flow took a reasonable time to complete each tasks. This indicated that the prompts and UI of the first two flows were learnable, robust, safe, and efficient.
Needs Improvement
The time to complete the buddy flow tasks was substantially higher. These results indicated that we needed to make some significant changes to the UI. Other causes of errors were: unclear buttons, lack of visibility in the system status and inconsistencies between the UI of each flow.
07
Reflect
Understanding Diverse perspectives.
Members within our team all came from diverse cultural and educational backgrounds, which provided unique viewpoints. This allowed us to develop creative solutions and designs. We also learned to balance our work styles and empathize with each other.
Adapting to Challenges & Uncertainties.
Throughout this project, I gained a greater understanding of how to adapt rapidly to changing environments and embrace the unknown. A pivot strategy can be adopted to achieve significant end results when adapting to changes in the process.
Having a great design is a result of great research.
Through this experience, I learned that research sets the stage for all design phases. We used robust initial research to identify the needs of users and then design solutions that address those needs using that knowledge.
08
next steps
01
Creating More User Personas
To figure out what are the unique “gems” of this app that attract people outside of our primary user base. Would ticket vendors be interested in the Discover flow “Event Group Chat” and promote to a crowd before an event?
02
Inhibiting “Anti-Users”
Taking a look at how we can inhibit “Anti-Users” and what behaviours we can anticipate from them to make Our Space as safe as possible.
03
More User Testing
Given that UofT has a diverse spectrum of learners and is very multicultural, test different ways to incorporate accessibility standards (i.e., via A/B testing) and language preferences for international and domestic students.