online sharing platform to improve youth mental health
Extending WellAhead's impact in promoting youth social and emotional wellbeing through an online platform to share everyday wellbeing practices with others.
Client
J.W. McConnell Family Foundation
Project Timeline
4 weeks
My Role
UI/UX
Copywriting
Engagement Strategy (post-launch)
main challenges
1. Sea of information:
There are many existing mental health for students initiatives and resources. Many teachers are already bombarded with resources that they find them burdensome.
2. Changing content:
The platform is intended to have content added frequently and therefore requires it to be a scalable design.
3. Legacy:
As the only designer + communications lead, I had to be mindful of how to build the system so it is easy and intuitive to use yet will remain consistent.
challenge #1: sea of information
card layout + actionable copy
In order to encourage our users to use these practices in their everyday life, I chose the card layout to facilitate quick information digestion. The copy is designed to be short, and includes a 1-3 page .pdf download for teachers to use in class.
Most of the existing mental health initiatives do not scale due to the lack thought put into how these initiatives/resources may be integrated into teachers' work. In light of this, we have weaved in British Columbia's new education targets (recognised by teachers locally) to encourage them to see these practices as integral to their changing work environment - and not an add-on.
Inspiration: Pokemon cards
Challenge #2: Consistently-changing content
scrolling card layout
The card layout also solves the problem of having content added to the site constantly. The information flow remains consistent and easy-to-consume while it can be easily scalable with adding new cards and pages.
Due to the privacy of the platform, this image is only a placeholder
Challenge #3: legacy
template backend
Considering legacy as an integral part of the design and creation of the webpage is crucial. Users do not care whether your project team has gone through major overhaul - they just want their product to work and its interactions fluid.
In building the Ideas Platform, I chose to use Wordpress due to my team and our users' familiarity with the platform. We customised all of the necessary fields to auto-populate icons, headers, body text, and images so that all of the content and aesthetics will remain consistent.
web experience
what i would do differently now
- Overall layout: Our user group has low expectations on the digital products that they use so we could design and implement this site within a month. However, much of the interactions could be improved. This includes: mis-alignment in text due a lack of time to re-jig the backend and the comment form - albeit being usable - could be more visually appealing.
- Categorisation & tagging: Although this is out of our project scope, we could have designed a quick user flow for the client in how they can tag and categorise their ideas better in the future.
- Engagement Strategy: An engagement strategy was developed with this platform, including getting teachers and students involved through local representatives. However, due to competing priorities, it was not implemented fully and was dropped later on. In the future, perhaps more intelligent engagement with the teachers beforehand would garner more excitement when the product is released.