PawFriend
Build a healthier mental health with therapy dogs
Overview
Last semester, I was invited to a dog therapy session held by the school during the final. I felt I was less stressed after interacting with therapy dogs at the session. After introducing this service to several cohorts, I surprisingly found many students have a problem of limited access to the information of dog therapeutic treatments. Thus, I want to design a system for students with depressive symptoms to easily attend the dog therapeutic sessions to improve their mental health.
Type Course Project
Time 2019 Sep-Dec
Tool Balsamiq, Principle, Figma
Team Jenny Sun
Role UX Design
Skill
Survey, Wireframing, Prototyping, UX design, Interaction Design, Usability Testing
Challenge
Depression is the most common in age 18 to 25, affecting nearly 2.2 million U.S. younger adults
How can we help students improve their depressive symptoms by attending therapy dog sessions regularly?
“Animal-human interactions, including playing, caring for, or simply petting a dog is believed to have positive effects on reduce depression.”
— “Alleviating Anxiety, Stress and Depression with the Pet Effect”, n.d.
Solution
PawFriend - A dog therapy app to reduce your depressive mood
Combined behavioral change techniques, PawFriend helps reduce depression by motivating regular therapy dog treatment sessions attending and keeping mood journaling while viewing mood states to break the unhealthy activities.
Explore and reserve dog sessions
Easy discover and book sessions by direct search, by recent group sessions, by featured events or request 1-on-1 sessions based on your needs.
Card design to get an instant view on event's location, timing and available spots
View Upcoming Session
Before event, receive an encouraging message from a previous attendee to motivate you to the reserved event
View the details of the reserved session on upcoming event tab and receive a mobile ticket for efficiently entry
Daily mood track
Receive a push notification prompt after a session or twice a day to keep on track of mood journaling
Use emoticons and activities icons to log a mood and the triggering activities in seconds.
Create customized moods and write personal memos to enrich entries
View Mood Stats
Explore interesting statistics about your moods and the reasons that depressed you on a summary graph to inspire more depression-reducing activities
Research
What’s the demand for dog therapy service?
We distributed an online survey to the students at the University of Michigan asking about their experience of dog therapy session. From the 150 respondents, we learnt that most students need therapy dog service but 60% of them don’t attend these sessions.
Understand the problems of current therapy dog service providers
We reached out to therapy dog owners and an school event holder to learn the related challenges from dogs service provider side:
Service are requested-based and individuals can’t request a service directly.
UM only cooperates with one single NGO
Dogs number for each event are varying, depends on how many therapy dog owner reply the invitation
No booking system so school event holder won’t know how many students will attend
What prevent students from using the service?
We interview 8 students to find out the reasons of student not using the service.
The questions are:
What is your main reason/motivation to use a dog therapy service to reduce your depression symptoms? If not, why haven't you visited therapy dog sessions?
How well does the dog therapy meet your needs? what do you think could be improved?
What is the most challenging aspect of trying to attend a dog session regularly?
If there’s a new service that helps you attend the dog sessions regularly, what features would you find the most valuable?
Students wants a system to help them receive the latest information of dog therapy sessions.
”I wish I could get updated session information”
Students consider a scheduling system is the most helpful.
" I always forget/don't find out about it, wish I can reserve beforehand"
Synthesize
Create a platform for better access to therapy dog services and reduce depression
For the solution, we chose to create a mobile application because its high coverage among students. We also identified 4 design goals to address the user challenges:
Clearly display information for easy search and schedule dog therapeutic session
Able to track the progress of depressive symptom
Encourage to attend session regularly and help users build habit of attending session
Playful visuals to make users feel the fun of dog session
Additionally, there are two users needs of our target users:
Need 1 : Students with mild or temporary depressive symptoms who need group sessions service.
Need 2: Students with severe depressive symptoms who need customized assistive dog therapy treatments or intimate time with dogs.
Both have similar motivations, but slightly different needs. More efficiency is needed for group 1 to book group session, and more introduction and guidance is needed for group 2 to book 1-1 session.
Ideate
Brainstorming and Feature Scoping
6-12 months of continuing treatment is suggested to decrease readmission of depressive symptoms (Harvard Health Publishing, 2018). With that in mind, we used causal diagram to ideate features for long-lasting behavioral change, and figured out how pre-conditions and interventions works to help students attend event regularly and to achieve better mental health in the long term.
The 4 key features and its theoretical construct:
Search (knowledge of information) and book (commitment)
Review reservation (self-efficacy)
Mood check in (self-monitoring)
View stats (self-awareness)
Sitemap
Structure Features with Information Architecture
Based on the four features, we created the main functionality flow of the app.
Prototype
Lo-fi Prototype
We created the lo-fi prototype and ran usability testing to verify the product ideas and the usability issues of interface at a higher level.
In the initial design stage, my teammate and I took pair-design to gain more design ideas first, and we held design critiques session to decide the best one.
Insights from 1st round usability testing
Session Reservation Page
Activity tracker and the start button in the reservation tab is confusing.
Mood Tracker
Using chatbox for daily mood entry is too time consuming.
The instructor concerns that the chatbox pushing a dog session suggestion when users reports in a bad mood cause a false conception of “going to a therapy dog session is a reward of being sad.”
Chatbot format is difficult for users to locate info and view overall mood stats
Iteration
Design Decision 1
Remove activity tracker so users can focus on booking info
Design Decision 2
Streamline mood tracking process with emoticon questionnaire to minimize user’s efforts
Keep it under 2 questions to reduce user’s recognition loads.
Prompt questions twice a day or right after a therapy dog session the important activities in the day to avoid the risk of being ignorant.
Design Decision 3
Design tabbed navigation for easily switch and view two types of mood stats
Insights from 2nd usability testing
In second usability testing, users only have issues with View Stats screens.
Some of the key feedbacks we received are:
1. The separated screens are not necessary
2. The stats on dog session tab don't provide insightful findings to users
3. The graphs on the mood tab are difficult to comprehend
Hi-fi Prototype
We created high-fidelity prototypes to fix the usability issues we found in the previous testing. We also wireframed all the user tasks of the app, including 1-on-1 session booking and profile, to ensure all the interaction and UI elements were well thought out.
Design Guideline
3rd Iterations
We fixed minor UI issues and iterated the mood stats page to make the stats more understandable.
Design Change 1
Use bar chart and card design to make mood stats summary glanceable and drive decision making
Design Change 2
Add small headlines and visual indicators to quickly locate items in mood journaling list
Final Design
If I had more time….
This is a fun project that I enjoyed a lot during the whole design process. There are two other features that I wish to explore more if I were to do this again:
01 Content and Level of Interaction of the Session
In our previous survey, people expressed interest of having more intimate interactions with the dogs. If I had more time, I would like to explore more about the interactions that users want to have with the therapy dogs. I think it would be a fun experience if users can select what they want to do with the dogs and design the activities for their own group or 1-1 sessions.
02 Physical Activity Tracker
In the early iterations, we included a physical activity tracker that helps users plan a route to the event and track their activity level. During the usability tests, while people liked this idea, they thought this part needs to be developed more in order to fit well into our app design. If I were to do this again, I would like to do more research about this and explored how I could incorporate this feature to our app.