What started as a goal to improve college students’ mental and physical health resulted in an application designed to offer peer-reviewed medical knowledge relevant to the average college student.
Curead is an app designed to help the college student that is eating way too much cup ramen and sleeping way too little to cram for their finals. The app offers peer-reviewed medical based articles that have been transformed into bite-sized reading pieces easy for people to read.
The design challenge for this project is to improve college students mental and physical health.
Relating with the Students
The best approach to empathize with the struggles students have with their health is to talk with them directly. 20+ undergrad students from different years gave the opportunity to sit down and talk with them about how they are doing in school, what they do to relax, what is currently stressing them out, etc… The interview sessions are invaluable as this is the starting point for getting into the heart of students’ anxieties and goals.
The interviewees shared common pain points such as having a goal, yet not having the tools or knowledge to get a start on said goal, a lack of knowledge on career building, the feeling of being behind in life, using social interactions as a means of comfort etc… One pain point is shared with the majority of students which acts as the insight statement for the project.
Im young who cares about my health!
This is the insight statement that was born from the 20+ interviews along with 3 supporting statements:
Students have a tendency to put their school and work above their own health which leads to less than ideal lifestyles
Students don’t have enough time in their schedule to address their health issues
Students make choices based on what is more convenient for them rather that what is healthier for them
Students don’t care about their health as they believe that is something to be considered later on in life
The focus now becomes creating a product that can restructure students’ priorities so that their health is just as, if not more important than work or school.
Brainstorming about the future
HMW questions and the ideation that attempts to solve those questions dominates the next phase of the strategic process. A wide variety of concepts, products, and services emerge from the brainstorming.
After going through countless post-its, the decision was made to go with Curead, an application that informs college students about the consequences of unhealthy habits and lifestyles and how to reform them. The information is delivered through peer-reviewed medical articles translated into bit-sized reads for the average student.
As for what Well Reading brings to the table, a list of features illustrates what key components encompass the app and how the app can accomplish it’s goal to assist unhealthy college students.
Account Creation
Peer-reviewed medical articles translated into bit-sized reads
Rating System (1 out of 5 stars)
Notification alert system for new articles
Bookmarking Articles
Provided links to original medical articles
Suggested articles based on reading history
Comment system and link sharing to SMS
With a clear idea of what the app should be the next step is establishing a starting point for the design process. For that to happen, a persona and user journey map are essential.
#Relate #Goals
Making the persona isn’t difficult thanks to the interviews held at the beginning of the project. After finding common personality traits, pain points, hobbies, aspirations, etc… a persona that most if not all college students can relate to become possible and his name is Ray.
Ray
21 y/o college junior
Taking 5 classes Mon - Thurs
Has a 3.0 GPA and struggles to maintain it
In a hurry to graduate
Works part time as waiter Wed - Sat
Feels overwhelmed most of the time
Feels unhealthy due to diet and lack of rest
Believes his health is not a priority
To accompany him, a journey map for a typical Wednesday for Ray highlights his routine and mood with and without the Well Reading.
With Curead, Ray’s behavior changes for the better due to learning about what the consequences are for what he is doing everyday and more importantly how to convert his bad daily habits into a positive lifestyle.
The only thing that remains now is transform all this data and planning into design.
New app who this?
Before doing any wireframes or mockups, the focus shifted to designing the logo and overall brand identity of Curead
A simple logo tying together the curative factors or medicine and reading with a pill and bookmark, accompanied by a color scheme that embodies well-being, and a simple typeface that is easy for the user to read long paragraphs of text.
After establishing what the app’s identity will be, next is building wireframes as to what the app’s base layout will be.
At first the idea was to have a layout where the artifacts took up most of if not all of the space in the main screens.
However, the app’s aesthetic was not reflective of Curead’s primary goal of being a informative yet easy-going experience. In order to do the app justice the wireframe stage started over.
These wireframes do a much better job of showcasing Curead by providing clean and simple elements while having some breathing space. All that is left is going into the mockup phase and bring Curead’s interface to life.
With a well constructed foundation all that’s left is simply going into Figma and pumping out high fidelity mockups. Sounds easy enough right?
Here is where a first time user first sees when they interact with Curead: A standard fill out section for the user’s info, a section for whether to upload a profile picture or not, and finally a section for what topics they want to pop up in their recommended feed. All of this is subject to change within the profile tab of the app.
These are the four main navigation tabs for Curead: A bookmark tab for later reading, a recommended tab that uses the topics the User chose in order to pick articles related to the User’s preferences and also acts as the splash page for users, a search tab for when the User wants to search for a specific article or wants to explore, and finally a profile tab where the user can change their personal info, picture, or topics.
Here is where the bulk of the User’s time will be; Reading articles that are either recommended to them or they themselves found, rating an article or sharing to their social media, and reading any comments left by other users.
However after all this one question does linger
Is this what we really wanted?
After all is said and done is this a product that college students want and more importantly need?
The only way to find out is by asking the students themselves if this is want they want and need. Students were shown a presentation alongside an Invision demo on how Curead can potentially change their school days for the better. A majority of them responded positively saying they would use the app if it meant learning about how to become and stay healthy. Here are some quotes from those students about Curead:
“You should totally make this app since its something I would definitely use.”
“Since most people our age don’t really care about our health, its good to have an app where it tells us that we really should.”
“This sounds pretty cool. Yeah I kinda don’t care about my health since work or school or friends get in the way, but this could change how I feel about being healthy. ”