Solution

Dr. Bruin is a chatbot that allows users to talk out their problems and suggests resources based on a user's wants and needs to minimize the cognitive load and stress around finding the right mental health resource.

Research

While Sheridan offers limited short-term counselling sessions to students, many are not aware that they exist or don't know how to access them.

Through interviews, short tests, and surveys with Sheridan students, alumni, and two counsellors, I found that people found resources difficult to find, were confused about what was offered, or had never heard of most of them. There were similarly names pages and links so people found it difficult to find what they were looking for. The main website and Sheridan Central also contained Counselling pages that showed different information.

What's the difference between the things in Build Community and Group Support?

User Quote- Pathways to Wellness tabs

Wow- this is a really long form. I don't think I'd fill this out, to be honest.

User Quote- Peer Mentor Sign-up Form

There's just too much to keep track of. I don't want to read all of this.

User Quote- Student Wellness Page

Do people even use Sheridan Central? No one ever mentions it so I forgot it even existed.

User Quote- Sheridan Central

When thinking about how the ideal user flow would go, I came across the problem of users having to choose from the many different services and resources available. Would users be able to look through and choose, especially when under high stress or cognitive load?

Cutting down on the text to make the information easier to understand and make resources easier to find would help mitigate only some of those problems.

From this research, I created different personas of students and a counsellor that would need help with different problems. I charted them on different graphs and created user journeys from both the student and counsellor perspective to ensure that I had a wide range of personas to work with.

Chatbot

Before going with a chatbot, I went through a few other iterations. I originally wanted to improve the existing flowchart resource on the counselling page but after research and testing found that it was too much information for that format. The questionnaire and text analyzer both required too much reading and typing- users wanted help in the fastest and easiest way. A chatbot feels like a regular conversation and is in shorter, easier to process blurbs than a long list of questions to read and think about.

I used the color scheme and type that Sheridan used to make it feel cohesive and like the chatbot was a part of Sheridan's services. The mascot was based off of the Sheridan Bruin and meant to give a feeling of talking to someone while being fun and gender-neutral.

For the chat, I made the layout similar to popular messaging apps like Facebook or Messenger. I also used the floating chat button that Facebook or customer service chats on websites use so people are familiar with the fact that they can close and open it when they want to.

Depending on what device the user accesses the chat on, the chat takes up either the whole screen with a back button to the page (mobile) or just a small popup window (computer/tablet).

Webpage Redesign

Using figma, I had participants arrange the major elements of the existing counselling & wellness page to see how to better optimize the layout and information it contained. I had the participants order the sections based on what they felt were most important and what flowed the best. I also had them talk out loud about what they thought about the information on the page like if it was needed, if it was too long, if it was helpful, and any other thoughts.

During testing of the existing webpage, one of the elements that caused some frustration was the expanding menu under the pathways to wellness section. The vertical expansion caused the page to move and was distracting and annoying to scroll through.

I created both a horizontal and vertical and found that everyone preferred the horizontal tab layout much more as it was less jarring and easier to read.