Becoming the User: Collaborating with Hopelab to Combat College Loneliness
By Anna Nguyen, Jerome Wang, & Vivian Hong
Hopelab has collaborated with the Fung Fellowship since 2016, providing meaningful mentorship, facilitating design sprints and networking events, and was a contributing sponsor to our program.
From the very first time college students step on campus, we are overwhelmed with change. For many, coming to college means living in a new city away from the familiarity of childhood friends and family. The start of the “best four years” of our life are accompanied by questions that race through our minds: “What do I want to major in? How do I get to my classes? Did I pick the right school?” Everyone around seems to be settling in, bringing to question why adjusting is so hard for you. Things are different now — lonely. Everyone is fending for themselves and no one seems to be looking out for you. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Hopelab wants to end loneliness on college campuses to improve the mental health of students entering college.
Hopelab is a social innovation lab that uses scientifically-based design to improve the health and wellbeing of teenagers and young adults through technology. Some of Hopelab’s notable projects include Re-Mission, a video game aimed to improve treatment adherence in young cancer patients, and the Nurse-Family Partnership, which provides support to young mothers through a mobile application.
In early March 2019, 12 Fung Fellows had the opportunity to visit the Hopelab office in San Francisco. These Fellows come from all corners of campus, representing majors that include Public Health, Bioengineering, and Data Science. As Fellows, we were all eager to learn more about human-centered design and used our visit to Hopelab as an opportunity to dive deeper into the design process. We were given insight into their testing and ideation processes by engaging in their newest product as users.
Fighting Loneliness One Challenge at a Time
Loneliness is a real problem that many college students face, and something that us Fellows had personal experiences with. Due to the scale of this issue, Hopelab decided to create an application to tackle early stage experiences that may lead or contribute to college student loneliness. Within this app, students are encouraged to take on various real-life challenges. These challenges start off with something as simple as saying ‘hi’ to someone in your housing unit to grabbing dinner with them. In college, and especially at Cal, we meet so many new people so quickly it is easy to lose out on meaningful conversations and interactions. This application is targeted at helping students stay on the right track and equipping them with social skills that ultimately lead to healthy relationships in the rest of college.
Within my small group of Fellows, one overarching common theme we shared was that the relationships, conversations, and interactions we had in the first few weeks of school dictated who we would talk to and hang out with the rest of the semester. Sadly, for those who were scared to reach out or maybe felt excluded also felt that for the remainder of the semester. Therefore, challenges like joining a club was a nudge that would lead to more positive social interactions. Even though these challenges may seem easy to do, they create lasting important impacts that we all thought were necessary and beneficial to the college experience. Fighting loneliness can start with saying ‘hi.’
Putting it to the Test
Paired with Denise Ho (Director of Design), Lionel Ramazzini (Designer), or Emma Bruehlam-Senecal (Research Associate), we were split into three groups of four to five and reviewed wireframes, branding, user flows, and moodboards.
My group walked through six different wireframes and especially liked how Hopelab aimed to provide step-by-step simple guidelines to help someone navigate their first few interactions in college. A transfer student, for instance, who has trouble making friends can go on the app and find ways, such as joining a new club or finding a study group in class, to expand their social circle. This app then provides this student with simple milestones to achieve, including going to the first meeting or taking the initiative to make a first conversation with someone at the club. The process overall was kept very intuitive and friendly. During the user testing period, we encountered an issue around incentivizing college students to use this app. We provided a few ideas, such as branding it under the university name or even making some sort of reward system to gain points for tangible goods.
Aside from wireframes, we also provided feedback on branding and helped brainstorm names and graphic themes. We were provided with a few names that they previously brainstormed and performed a small ideation session, in which each of us were given a few minutes to come up with brand names. In my group, Wave and Nod were some of the names that stood out. These names were easily memorable and suggested friendly acts of gestures and in-person interactions, which aligned heavily with what the app aims to promote. With branding, graphic themes were also very important in developing the whole user experience. Hopelab designers provided us with consolidated graphics designed by a third party. Each graphic had unique elements, colors, and strokes. Some graphics leaned more toward the futuristic, tech themes with darker background tones and bolder colors in contrast. Other graphics had more muted colors and seemed to be more soothing and calm, which seemed to be more fitting for this user experience.
Throughout the entire experience, Denise, Lionel, and Emma were great facilitators in the process. They did not prompt us toward a certain direction, remained extremely receptive to feedback, and highly valued our opinions regardless of whether our ideas aligned with their initial hypothesis.
Learning by Design
By interacting with Hopelab’s project, we were exposed to a greater holistic aspect in designing a solution for a customer. They showed us what great customer engagement looks like and walked us through each aspect of their project, collecting feedback and explaining the reasoning behind their choices along the way. They also demonstrated the importance of branding and graphic design in improving user experience and making the technology user-friendly and actually usable. The designers asked just the right questions to prompt stories and ideas that we didn’t know we had and encouraged us to share absolutely anything that came to mind, resulting in a wave of unfiltered thoughts that could be tied back into the development of the application. Hopelab showed us that all user input was valuable, even if it takes an unexpected turn.
As a Fellowship, we’ve devoted the past several months towards learning the ins and outs of human-centered design, but we seldom get to experience the other side of the process. It’s easy to brush off user testing as a means to validate the ideas that we come up with, but we can’t neglect the groups that we design for. We need to be receptive to feedback and make smart design choices to effectively address user pain points that might have been overlooked.
This is especially pertinent for the focus populations of the Fellowship: children and older adults. While we might have an idea of how to approach problems these groups face, we need to let their own lived experiences shape our ideation. If we want our product to have a place in our users’ lives, we must let them drive our design process.
Anna Nguyen is a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, studying Public Health and Data Science. Connect with Anna
Jerome Wang is a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, studying Public Health. Connect with Jerome
Vivian Hong is a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, studying Film and Media Studies & Public Health. Connect with Vivian
