User research: The emotional impacts of Social Distancing on College students- A UX case study
Brief: As designers, we have a unique opportunity and privilege to positively impact people’s lives. To do this, however, we have to first deeply understand and empathize with our audience.
Goals:
Our goal is to research the changes in the overall well-being and connectedness of college students who are experiencing college remotely. And from that, we want to uplift and refresh the mental health of college students who feel disconnected as a result of Social Distancing.
Our proposals: user insights
The Overview:
- Topic research: identify the problem area and target audience
- Secondary research summary
- Conduct a survey
- Conduct interviews.
- Create transcripts
- Analyze and find insights and research learnings
My role: With 2 other teammates, we as user researchers prepared a research plan, execute that plan, and synthesize our findings.
Timeline: This project lasts for 5 weeks
The Process:
- Topic research: brainstorm a problem area and target audience
This is the first step but also the most crucial for the foundation of the research. We first approach the topic research with the method called “Frame Your Design Challenge”. The goal is to identify the right design problem for the right target audience by answering some simple questions.
By this method, we identified that:
-Target audience: the college students who have been impacted by Social Distancing. Some additional information that we also want to know about their backgrounds is their mental health states and living situations.
-First “How Might We” question: How might we improve the mental health of college students who feel disconnected due to social distancing?
2. Secondary research summary
We made some secondary researches and here are some highlights:
We found that based on the comparisons of students’ social networks and mental health before and during the COVID-19 crisis in Switzerland, Stressors shifted from fears of missing out on social life to worries about health, family, friends, and their future. Exploratory analyses suggest that COVID-19 specific worries, isolation in social networks, lack of interaction and emotional support, and physical isolation were associated with negative mental health trajectories
Educators are key in protecting student mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic
Some ways to combat disconnection among student are
-Smaller class sizes
-One-on-one connection points
-Active connection over the passive connection
-Focused, meaningful interactions matter greatly
3. Conduct a survey: to understand the landscape of your target audience, their potential needs, and recruit them for your study.
The first step is to brainstorm what do we want to know from the user? What are the data to collect? Each of our team members came up with the questions. In the end, we grouped all of them to create the questions for the survey.
Survey result:
To study students’ attitudes towards social distancing and how it has affected their feeling of disconnection, we sent out a survey with 11 questions. 26 participants answered our survey.
-Among them, 36.4% of the respondents strongly agreed that “I feel major changes in terms of social connection due to pandemic.”
-While 39.4% of respondents think that they often feel disconnected within the past 2 weeks.
-In terms of aspects, people responded that their moods, relationships, and motivations are the most affected.
We also ask some of them to come back to the participant in another interview to gain more insights.
4. Conduct interviews
We are responsible for recruiting, scheduling, conducting, and documenting 6 interviews with members of your target audience: college students from different backgrounds. Each team member led 2 interviews.
To prepare for interviews, I created an interview discussion guide that I can follow to drive the interview forward but generally, I want to create more conversational sections.
These interviews will be conducted remotely via video conference and lasted about 30 to 60 minutes each.
Here are some of the most striking quotes we got from our participants:
5. Create a transcript to use for analysis/synthesis.
From the video transcripted, our team collected the significant points and gather them at the same place. We mapped the response and thought of the user to understand their environment and emotional connection using an affinity map.
After mapping, we can identify which aspects are more concerned about or affected by social distancing. We find patterns and themes across your users. Some of these will be context, some aspirations, some user goals, some problems, some solutions. These are our 3 biggest pain points:
6. Analyze and find insights and research learnings
A surprise that we find is the spontaneity is a crucial aspect that maintains connectedness in a student’s life. Because colleges are now mainly online, students feel isolated staying inside at home most of the day in front of a screen doing work. So they need to get engaged in spontaneous social moments throughout a typical day for socially distanced college students so that they feel connected and have a sense of community.
Conclusion
Rephrase the “How Might We” question: How might we create a spontaneous moment in the time of social distancing so they can feel more connected with themselves and their peers?
What can I do better?
- Research about the features and results of competitors.
- Select participants from different areas.
- Usability test of the prototype with users.
- Design direction.
What are the next steps?
- General persona plus journey map to explore specific pain points and opportunities
- Solutions: Come up with design concepts, then prototypes and iterations
Learnings
This project gives me the importance of surveys and interviews. Before going into the details of researching, our team discusses what’s the possible outcomes of this project. We know who is the target audience but we don’t really know “who” they are: who has to listen to them in order to truly understand their goals, needs, and motivations.
Even with a certain knowledge of the topic (and intellectual guesses), everyone is surprised about the insight (spontaneous moment in daily college life ). I gained deeper knowledge about user research, the target audience, and their point of view. And the most important lesson that you need to ask the right questions in order to solve the right problem.
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Thank you for reading. This is my first post on this platform so please leave your valuable feedback for me to improve.
