How a mobile app can improve accessibility and awareness of services offered by Cal Poly’s Health Center.
Context:
9-Week Project with Iter8 Cal Poly Role: Designer Team: Anais Gomez (PM), Jessica Mason (PM), Kylie Wong (PM), James Irwin, Mahati Subramanium, Alex Woon
Can't wait to see it? Check out our prototype here ↗
Background
Many students don’t know about services offered by Campus Health and Wellbeing at Cal Poly...
The Campus Health and Wellbeing services are a collection of student support programs that address basic needs, counseling services, and medical services for Cal Poly SLO. These services are accessed on-campus at the Health Center, a few of which are promoted their official website.
So we designed an easier way for students to access and learn about Campus Health resources
Our team at Cal Poly Iter8 designed a mobile app to increase awareness of the Health and Wellbeing program and to improve student’s accessibility to their services. Keep reading to see what we’ve done!
Research - 1
We conducted qualitative interviews with 10 students and experts
Our interviews covered the following segments: regular users of the health center, those who hadn’t used the health center before, and student leads and staff of the health center. We asked our interviewees to share about their experiences with the Health Center.
Students can only schedule appointments in person or over a phone call, and usually can’t schedule in advance.
Finding mental health information is difficult
Information on mental health services is very unorganized on the Health Center website.
Checking availability in the food pantry is inconvenient
The food pantry is a free service that provides food to students in need. Currently, students visit the pantry physically to check the inventory, where they are sometimes out of luck.
Research - 2
We performed SWOT analyses on competitors’ sites and apps
We compared the Cal Poly Campus Health and Wellbeing website to those of other college universities. We created SWOT analyses to assess what works and what doesn’t, and how we could implement successful features into our prototype. We then created user flows based on the insights from our interviewees.
We found most competitors’ sites faced similar issues as Cal Poly’s
Creating appointments is challenging
Bad typography, walls of text, 20+ drop down menus on a single page, meaningless icons, too many links, the list goes on and on. Most organizations seem to struggle to effectively communicate all of the unique services they offer students.
Problem Statement
How might we improve student accessibility and increase awareness of the unique resources offered by Campus Health and Wellbeing?
So students don’t have to call or come in-person for appointments
A well-organized catalog of Counseling Services
So students don’t struggle to find info on mental health services
A live catalog of what is available in the Food Pantry
So students don’t have to check in-person
A calendar to show desired Health Center events
So appointments and other events aren’t scattered
Creating appointments is challenging
Lo-Fi Wireframes
Wireframes + User Flow
We broke down the Campus Health and Wellbeing services into three main areas: health and pharmacy services, the food pantry, and counseling services.
Testing
We tested on two designated user groups
One group of users was given specific tasks to complete. The other group of users was given no task and was asked to roam the app freely.
And here's what we found
Issues that came up:
01
A clear back button is crucial.
02
Links need to be clearer and act as a call to action.
03
Consistent spacing and alignment are important.
Changes we made:
01
Tidied prototype paths and added exit buttons
02
Defined buttons with a gold color and increased surface area for clicking
03
Ensured all spacing was accurate (time-consuming, but important!)
Design System
A more gentle spin on Cal Poly’s branding
We chose colors from Cal Poly’s official style guide that felt more gentle and comforting than their normal branding. For typography, we broke away from Cal Poly’s style guide with Sofia Pro for its friendly feel.
Prototype
01
A unified home screen
The home screen greets users with important info like upcoming events, announcements, hours, and directions to the health center. Users can also access their notifications and profile page.
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02
Tracking the Food Pantry stock
Daily inventory is featured in the top carousel for easy access. Below are important announcements such as closures for the week and volunteer opportunities.
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03
More accessible health services
Appointment scheduling and prescription preorders are designed to be easier to complete on the app.
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04
Well-organized mental health info
Exploring counseling services is more organized and as granular as you want. Appointment scheduling is encouraged with a simple “Call to Schedule” button.
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05
A simple calendar to bring it all together
See Campus Health events that interest you all in one place, or filter the calendar by department for less clutter.
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Reflection
I learned so much!
This was the second time I worked on a team design project and I learned so much about project organization and effective communication. Using tools like Coda (it’s like Notion) for collaborative project organization was amazing; everyone was kept up to date and ideas were saved for all to see.
Next time I would collect more quantitative data
In the first week of our project we did all of our research which meant we had to focus on qualitative interviews rather than waiting for students to answer a survey. While I believe qualitative research was more valuable for this project since we were focusing on students’ stories and experiences with the health center, I think qualitative data is important for conveying the weight of an issue to stakeholders. Having statistics to illustrate the level of difficulty students currently have with the Health Center would make it easier to prove to Cal Poly that change is necessary.
