Convo — Jennifer Li

CONVO: Life Questions

A set of questions cards design to initiate more open conversations about mental health between depressed individuals and their supporters.

We partnered with UW Forefront, a sucide prevention program to design a solution that facilates open conversations about mental health.

Convo: Life Questions is a tool we designed for supporters of depressed individuals in any background. Its open ended structure allows for a freeform conversation around mental health yet expands boundaries in a comfortable fashion. Here is how the cards are used:

Grab a friend (or two!)
Each card contains a question related to mental health. The color code on the top corner signifies the seriousness of the questions
Users take turns drawing cards and answer the question

Research

Quantitative: Existing data & Online survey

We conducted secondary research regarding suicide statistics and looked into existing suicide treatments(hotline, therapies, counseling, etc.). We think the biggest shortcoming of the current solutions is that all of them required the individual themselves to take initiative. We also sent out a survey to the general public to find out conversation habits and experiences and received 14 responses.

Qualitative: User interviews with Forefront

We reached out to Forefront, a leading organization for suicide prevention at UW. Marny, a loss survivor, working as a program manager at Forefront, corroborated our assumption about existing treatments, saying, “It is difficult for them [persons afflicted with suicidal thoughts] to rationalize for themselves.” We also interviewed an attempt survivor named Karen as she shared her experience dealing with suicide. She told us: ““They just told me to ‘be happy’, but it is not that simple.”

User Personas

Here are some key takeaways from research:

87.5% of respondents turn to friends when feeling depressed and 56.3% seeking out parents. Significantly fewer (34.4%) responded to meeting with a therapist or counselor.
Having empathetic conversations and providing emotional support is key in helping those in need cope with suicidal thoughts
Building around “supporters”, teaching people to recognize signs and how to interact with those facing suicidal thoughts is more effective than attempting to build directly with those who are depressed

To summarize the major user pain point:

There is urgent need for meaningful conversations around mental health, but it is difficult for individuals who suffer from depressive thoughts to reach out.

Based on this, we created two key user personas: Help Seeker & Supporter

Brainstorm & Ideation

We conducted three individual brainstorm sessions and came up with ideas ranging from using music as a conversation piece to developing a support network of people in need and connecting them to supporters. Between ideation sessions, we narrowed down our solution by creating a list of design requirements. Ultimately, we came to the idea of using conversation starter cards to ask the more serious questions.

Initial Prototypes

We created low-high fidelity prototypes and came up with over 40 different questions pertaining to mental health at varying levels of seriousness. We decided to use colors to indicate the seriousness of the questions.

Initially, 5 sticky-notes are used to represent how the question cards might look like and did a round of user testing on the UX concept with Forefront volunteers. While we received positive feedback, we became more cautious with the choice of colors and questions.