G1: User Research
The target audience for my project is people who struggle with mental health such as depression, anxiety, and loneliness, and could be but don’t have to be clinically diagnosed. Additionally, I am looking to build something for peer-to-peer informal support, so that would mean my target audience is willing to get and give help from others.
The direction I’m planning to take with this project is building out a way for people to indicate their mental health needs and availability to help using some sort of status indicator, much like online status indicators provide some insight as to who is currently available and who is not.
To investigate I sent out an anonymous survey and did some observations of peer-to-peer informal support groups, including participating in one of the groups. I chose a survey to get multiple perspectives given a short turnaround time. Conducting interviews would potentially take longer with scheduling coordination, and might be less comfortable for people to partake in considering the sensitive nature of the subject. Doing a contextual inquiry wouldn’t fit well with the context of the project, so I chose to do observation instead, since it didn’t rely on scheduling and I could observe a group for as long as I needed.
I shared the survey with others in the capstone class, a multidisciplinary group of HCI folks at UW, and a UW Discord server. As you can see, there is already going to be bias in the responses since everyone is from this school, but I didn’t feel comfortable asking friends individually to fill out the survey due to the sensitive nature of the topic.
I didn’t get many responses to the survey, so I wasn’t able to make a lot of generalizations from the data, but here are a few things I noticed. Most people have friends from in- person (rather than friends from online) they can turn to for mental health support, followed by family. When they do need help, people will usually turn to friends or family first. Some reasons people don’t reach out for help even though they would like to include: feeling like their problem is trivial or that they should deal with it themselves, their friends also need help so they don’t want to be extra burden, insecurity or anxiety around sharing personal issues, and believing that others cannot help them. When asked about how they would react to seeing a request for mental health help from an anonymous stranger, most people said they had never seen this before or they would offer help. When asked how they would react to a friend needing help, most said they would listen and support however they can, and if they were burnt out themselves, they would still listen but set expectations up front. I asked survey respondents to rank what factors would be most important to them if they were to get mental health help from an anonymous stranger. Popular factors that were ranked as “highly important” include: the stranger has or had similar struggles as them, has the level of energy to provide help, can be contacted again in the future, and has gone through mental health peer support training or has been vetted by peers. A few said they would not want help from an anonymous stranger at all.
An insight I see here is that a tool for getting mental health help should be able to connect people in need with available family and friends, as well as strangers if nobody in their network has sufficient energy to help them. I’m hoping that the idea of status indicators will let people not only show how much they need help, but also how available they are to give help, since others’ availability was seen as a barrier to asking for help. It is comforting to see that most people would try to help a stranger and would be willing to get help from a stranger. The factors ranked as most important will help me design what people would be able to indicate and filter for when seeking or providing help to someone they don’t know.
For the observation, I did a general google search for peer-to-peer mental health support groups, and there are many. I came across a subreddit called r/KindVoice that has a unique system for indicating wanting support and being able to offer support. I didn’t see this in other groups and it seems like the closest thing that exists to my idea of mental health status indicators, so I decided to look closer into this subreddit. The guidelines of this subreddit are to title each post indicating whether you are “looking” for or “offering” help. People are also encouraged to put their gender identity and age. Through the r/KindVoice I found the KindVoice Discord. It operates using a similar system as the subreddit, but since Discord offers more server flexibility and features, it has some additional capabilities. The “looking” and “offering” tags are roles in the Discord, and someone can type “@offering” to notify everyone with that role. Roles can be easily reassigned via a bot. The Discord has the option of public threads and DMs, just like the subreddit, but also includes an option for voice chat. Since Discord servers support multiple channels, there are channels for variations of getting and giving help, such as a channel for ranting without needing a response, a channel for relationship support, a “user index” channel for introducing yourself and writing about topics you can help with, etc.
During my observation of this server I offered help to someone once. I had a private message chat with them for about 30 minutes or so; they just wanted to talk to someone since they were feeling lonely. I also saw some messages to the server asking to voice chat with a female specifically, and I saw subsequent discussion on the server (in a separate channel) on what to do about cases like this, where it’s unclear what the person’s motivations are.
Some opportunities I see here are to be able to filter by other things besides gender and age and make the user-index more user friendly and usable. It’s currently just a channel with a bunch of introduction messages. I also think some way of preventing harassment and trolling would be useful, although I’m not sure how to go about doing that yet.