Case Study — Ginger Roots. Role: Project Manager, User researcher…
By: Kristine Huynh
Tags: UX Design, UX Research, Ginger, UX

The Problem:

While Ginger is providing excellent services for their adults, their services are not directed towards the younger generation. Ginger wants to cater to teenagers within their app, so we decided it was important to present in our new design. They would like to expand their services to the teenage demographic to support them in facing their own personal issues anonymously, so they feel open to discuss their personal affairs, without judgment from their peers. This is a General Assembly concept project.

After looking over our project brief, we set out to converse user interviews. We decided to think of who we can interview and fit the description of candidates. It was fundamental for us to chat with mental health professionals who worked with adolescents to advise us on how to initiate and strategize well-structured user interviews with teenagers. We agreed this was the best course of action because it helped us gain insight on how to talk to teenagers. Through networking, we connected with five teens in our demographic who shared their thoughts on mental health to further our key research insights.

Key Research Insights:

Next, we analyzed our insights from seven users: five teens between the ages eleven to eighteen years old and two mental health professionals.

Some key observations we gathered from teenager interviews are listed below:

“My friends know me better than anyone else in my life.” “Therapists can be really helpful for learning about mental health and strategies.” “It helps me cope with my mental health when I talk to my friends.” “Teens are so supportive of each other — sometimes too much.”

This last quote highlighted teenagers crave to be involved in their friends’ mental health noticing they are empathetic and supportive of each other. But the downfall adolescents face is that they are not advocating for themselves because they refuse to burden their peers. So, they harbor their problems to themselves.

This affinity map with our 7 interviews benefited us in further synthesizing and analyzing our user persona and problem statement.

Competitive Analysis:

We wanted to differentiate our application from our competitors, so we conducted a competitive analysis. We had six key parameters that we addressed within our application. They were:

On-demand support Community group Professional groups Learning resources Mentoring No fee.

To see what Ginger was missing, we compared five different companies: Crisis Text Line, Therapy Tribe, BetterHelp, Big Brothers Big Sister, and YMCA. The most prominent features that Ginger is missing from its application are community groups and mentoring. These features are essential based on our user research, which found that many teens gravitated towards more community and peer-based group chats because adolescents prefer to receive advice from their peers rather than from adults.

We investigated marketing strategy to understand how to retain adolescents’ attention. The key points are made below:

Build an easy and simple navigation application. We required straightforward and easy navigation that is visually appealing to hold the teenager’s attention span. Gamifying incentives to increase application engagement. We aspire to occupied teens to regularly participate in the application, so they can receive badges. Ensuring anonymity. We want teens to be comfortable and avoid the negative stigma surrounding mental health problems.

Persona:

After we synthesized our affinity map, we were off to generate our user persona, Jenny Wilson. She is a fifteen-year-old high school freshman who empathized with her peers and family. She strove to excel in school while being a model daughter. Unfortunately, this caused her to be highly stressed and longed for a better outlet away from her social circle.

Problem and solution statement:

Once we crafted our user persona, we developed a problem statement: Jenny needed a private way to address her own mental health issues outside of her normal social circle because being the model student, friend, and daughter is causing her stress and burnout.

Our problem statement above guided us to construct our 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 and counselor, access resources about mental health, and potentially connect with a licensed therapist.

User flow:

With our problem statement in mind, we created a user flow describing how Jenny uses the app. This revealed decisions the user might encounter through a happy and unhappy pathway. Using this methodology revealed decisions the user might encounter and helped us discover potential problems within our final product.

Iterations:

During our construction of our designs, we had a sketch session iterate on our designs. From there, we discussed and compromised with each other on the app pages we wanted to include. Throughout the process, we all consulted and gave feedback on the design of the cards. I stitched the prototypes together, so we could execute a cohesive mobile application. I was in charge of constructing the connections between each screen to transition smoothly to the next. It was exhilarating, we finally completed the final product after probing multiple usability testings making sure every little detail was counted.

Sketches:

Wireframe:

Usability testing insights:

After going through our redesigns, we asked five users to test our mid-fi prototype. The main takeaways were:

Users felt the navigation was easy and intuitive. Users were puzzled about the forum icon on the navigation. “They liked the colorful button for resources and activities.” The coach and group chat should have been under one icon in the navigation bar.” “Users wanted to see if there was a section for news in the activities and resources.”

High fidelity screens:

High fidelity usability testing insight:

I conducted three high fidelity usability tests to improve on the next iterations for our prototypes.

Next steps:

We would like to go forth and create a desktop site as a result of our user interviews because some teenagers from our interviews did not have a mobile phone until high school. I want to improve on the prototype’s animation; I am inspired by my peers’ work from something as simple as a message bubble. Lastly, we would continue fleshing out more of the resources and activities screens.

Lesson learned:

I should not worry about having perpetual validation. I need to learn to bring more confidence in myself and not compare myself to others but learn from them. In addition, I should not overcompensate by doing extra work, I am working in a team and we are working together.