Case study: Ginger Roots. Organization: General Assembly Team…
By: Peter Glanting
Tags: Case Study, User Experience, Product, Design, UI

NOTE: The following is a case study for General Assembly

Organization: General Assembly

Team: Kristine Huynh, Melanie Schultz, Peter Glanting

Tools: Figma, Google Drive

Time Frame: 2-Week Sprint

My Role: UX/UI Designer

Indulge us for a moment with a thought exercise: Think about all the training that astronauts underwent for the first moon landing. Think about all the months, years, of rigorous physical, mental, and emotional preparedness.

Now imagine that those astronauts went through no training. Imagine that NASA officials just shoved the astronauts into ill-fitting space suits, threw them in a space shuttle, and blasted them off to the moon. Somehow, these improvised space explorers land on the moon completely unscathed. But the astronauts don’t know where they are, how long they’ll be there, or how to get back home. They’re stuck in an alien land isolated from everything that they know.

This is what teens face everyday: in unfamiliar territory, navigating through it the best way they know how. And with a pandemic that forces teens away from the peer support networks that they’ve come to rely on, the need for mental health services for teens has never been more apparent than it is today.

So why not use the Ginger app? It’s made mental health accessible to adults the world over, and has everything an adult would want in a therapy app. Great idea, except that Ginger is for adults–not teens. Teens have different needs when it comes to mental health, and they tend to resist traditional forms of therapy. So — to continue with the space metaphor — Ginger is NASA. What we need is Space Camp.

The Process

And this is where my team and I come in. Astronauts in our own right at our General Assembly UX boot camp, we’ve been tasked with boldly going where Ginger has yet to go by creating a version of Ginger for teens. The problem? None of us are teens. We don’t even know any teens. How do teens browse? How do they interact with each other? What do teens do differently from adults, and how can we accommodate them in our product? This would prove to be the crux of our research. (A note: This project was done for our UX bootcamp on spec).

Research

Getting to Know the Product

Ginger is already doing a great job at providing adults easy access to comprehensive mental health services. Chief among these services are as follows:

Providing on-demand support to people globally, through smart phones.

Taking a preventative approach to mental health

Addressing issues before they evolve into greater challenges by identifying patterns of anxiety, stress, and depression.

This will provide a strong foundation of what services Ginger Roots will provide to teens.

C&C Analysis

This Competitive and Comparative analysis reflects the aforementioned foundations of accessibility and preventative care that promise to make Ginger Roots a strong teen-mental-health provider.

It also reveals opportunities to better serve our teen demographic: Our research indicates that teens tend to gravitate toward more community or peer based mental health solutions.

Competitive and Comparative Analysis

Defining Our User

With these considerations in mind, we wanted to take a deep dive into how teens interact with technology, each other, and mental health.

Affinity mapping

If you’ve ever seen any stock imagery of people “doing UX”, it’s probably of designers using this process in which quotes are committed to post-it note, then grouped according to theme.

Affinity Map

For our affinity mapping, we interviewed interviewed 5 teens, ages 11–18, as well as 2 mental health professionals who work with teens. Some particularly standout quotes from our affinity mapping is as follows:

Key Insights

Key Insights

•”My friends know me better than anyone else in my life.”

Kids rely heavily on meaningful relationships with their peers to solve problems, get advice, and make sense of the world.

•”I use technology to keep in touch with friends”.

Technology has never been more present in teens’ lives than it is today. It enables teens to maintain and enhance those meaningful relationships that are so important to them.

•”Teens are so supportive of each other — sometimes too much”.

Teens are surprisingly empathic, focusing on their friends’ mental health while neglecting their own. Not wanting to burden others, they’ll keep their problems to themselves until it’s too late.

Persona

From our interviews and research, we created a fictionalized user called a persona — an embodiment of the research and interviews that we conducted — whom we named Jenny.

Jenny is a 15 year-old high-school freshman, who is highly social and cares about her friends.

She is a good student, and holds herself to high expectations. Jenny gets stressed out from the pressure within and without, and she doesn’t want to burden her friends with her problems. So she needs to find an outlet to handle her stress better, without bothering her friends.

With Jenny embodying our synthesized research, we’re ready to move onto our problem statement.

User Persona

Problem Statement

Jenny needs a private way to address her own mental health issues outside of her normal social/family circle because being the model student, friend, and daughter is causing her stress and burn-out.

Solution Statement

Ginger Roots is a mobile app that provides teens with a private space to talk with peers about their issues, receive support from a mentor/counselor, access resources about mental health, and potentially connect with a licensed therapist.

Design

User Flow

Let’s talk about how our persona, Jenny, actually uses this app. In the user flow (see diagram below), Jenny opens the app to talk about her stressors in the discussion board, and then chats with her coach. After doing both of those action items she feels less stressed and more relaxed.

User Flow

Sketches and Wireframes

With a user flow in place, we can blast-off to some renderings of our app–sketches and wireframes. We did some initial sketches as a generative activity, then found our way to the wireframes, which would bare a closer resemblance to our final product, and which we could test on users.

Low-Fidelity, Generative Sketches

Mid-Fidelity Wireframes

Usability Testing

After two rounds of extensive usability testing, we were able to pinpoint the key success factors of Ginger Roots, as well as the main things that we’d need to improve upon.

Pro

•Navigation is easy and intuitive for the most part.

•Users were excited to use services like breathing and meditation.

•Mood tracker is appealing (particularly fond of the smiley-face barometer)