Case Study: Wellthy
Wellthy — Empowering students to take charge of their holistic wellness
Health and Wellness — Designing Experiences for Learning, Spring 2021, Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design
Wellthy is an interactive, digital-physical individual educational experience designed to help college students learn about holistic wellness and take charge of their personal wellness. Users will be embodying a persona who they will carry through their wellness journey, and then apply what they learned to themselves.
THE DESIGN TEAM
Anjali Kanodia (Anjali) is a third-year undergraduate Architecture student with a keen interest in Psychology and Education.
Premkumar Loganathan (Prem) is a second-year graduate student, pursuing Master's in Public Policy Management and Data Analytics.
Likhitha Chintareddy (Likhitha) is a third-year undergraduate Electrical and Computer Engineering student pursuing minors in Design for Learning and Cybersecurity and International Conflict.
Our diverse fields of study and past experiences enriched the brainstorming sessions with different viewpoints and helped us approach the design challenges from different perspectives.
THE PROBLEM
We started the process with a focus on students — both college and high school — and identified motivation, knowledge, and skill gaps in the space of health and wellness. Learning from personal experience as well as our observation of students around us, we recognized that, first and foremost, students simply do not consider wellness a priority. Further, wellness is largely viewed as corrective rather than preventative, and individuals often get demotivated from investing in their wellness because the rewards are slow. With respect to knowledge, wellness is often perceived as a combination of exercise, nutrition, self-care, and sleep, and there is very little awareness about holistic wellness. With respect to skills, traditional educational setups rarely or simply do not offer formal education on holistic wellness, or train students to develop skills to grow their wellness.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TOPIC
We recognized that well-being is important, no matter who one is and what one does. If not addressed now, it can cost one time, money, peace, and relationships in the future.
STAKEHOLDERS
We identified our key stakeholders as students, students’ personal and professional Networks (families, friends, colleagues, employers), and educational institutions.
AUDIENCE + CONTEXT
Our intended audience is college students. Our choice was informed by considerations of accessibility for user testing, and an inherent understanding of our user group since we are part of it ourselves. Initially, we were considering narrowing our target audience from college students of any level to those only at CMU, and perhaps only undergraduate freshmen, given that they’re new to college, are likely the most impressionable, and given their early college enthusiasm, are easy targets to engage in a new experience. However, we broadened our scope to include all college students, recognizing that wellness is a personal journey, and our experience could, instead of being prescriptive, be designed in a way that it would be guided by user input, and accommodate for students at different points in their academic and professional lives.
Our learning experience exists in a combination of digital and physical contexts. We envision it to be introduced to college students during their freshman orientation, by career advisors at the college career center, as well as by individual department academic advisors. Given that it is an individual, self-paced learning experience, users can engage in it at any time and place as per their convenience, as long as they have access to the app on their phone and the physical components of the experience.
GOALS
Before establishing goals for our design, we conducted a user survey asking college students some questions about health and wellness. When asked, “What, in your view, constitutes good health?” 78% said physical fitness and/or mental health, 30% said nutrition, but 100% said that their academic & professional goals were a higher priority than their wellness. A guiding goal for us became reframing wellness for our learners, allowing them to see wellness as supportive of their goals and priorities. With this design, we aim to teach students that —
1. Investing in wellness doesn’t need to be corrective — it can be preventative if you know about it and can actively work on growing your wellness.
2. Everyone perceives wellness differently, and wellness is a personal journey — one size doesn’t fit all.
3. Wellness is a continuous process — having a ‘progress over perfection’ mindset is key.
4. There’s always room for growth!
Since a significant priority for us was reframing wellness for students, establishing value for our learners became a big goal. Further, since this is a long-drawn-out process, other goals included motivating our learners and holding their attention. Lastly, since our users belong to a generation of instant gratification and the rewards for investments in wellness are slow, another goal was to create a system for measuring progress. However, we also had to be mindful of the fact that this couldn’t be a prescriptive system of measuring but had to be user-defined given how personal wellness is.
DESIGN APPROACH
We initially started out with looking at mainstream perceptions of health such as physical, mental, and nutritional health, but our stakeholder survey and deeper research on wellness led us to pivot our focus to holistic wellness. We identified occupational and intellectual wellness as the most relevant to dive deep into for our learners, and an appropriate challenge for our protoype while still narrowing down the scope.
CHALLENGES
- Less resources available in the public domain about holistic wellness, ways to measure and improve wellness.
- The remote work situation constrained us in working together in person to develop the physical aspects of the prototype.
- Lack of previous experience in designing mobile application screens and no previous experience to design tools like Figma, led to a larger learning curve and more time spent on learning the tools.
CONCEPTUAL MODEL
Our key focus was reframing wellness for our learners, teaching them about holistic wellness and diving deeper into intellectual and occupational wellness. Establishing value became a significant part of the process, and McCarthy’s 4MAT system afforded a good flow to begin with establishing the ‘why’ for our learners, and following it with teaching them theory, then helping our users learn transferable skills, and finally helping them see the broader application of the skills we were teaching them.
We decided to teach learners about intellectual and occupational wellness within the context of designing their careers. Since this was either uncharted territory for our learners or a source of anxiety, providing an opportunity to embody a persona and practice on them before applying the learnings to themselves was a promising approach. Zimmerman’s Magic Circle afforded a strong framework for designing this, by setting up a process of providing information in the ‘real world,’ taking learners into a magic circle where they could role play and help a persona with their career, to return to the real world again to apply the process to their own selves. This integrated well with the second step of the 4MAT circle, and would also help build positive expectancy with respect to competency, in alignment with Ambrose’s theory about Motivation. Further, alternating information with activity in a sequence of information (establishing value), activity (magic circle/what), information+activity (self-reflection/how), and information (what if) would help break monotony of the experience and hold learners’ attention.
Lastly, since this would likely be the first time our learners would be learning skills to grow their wellness, it would be essential to scaffold the learning incline by teaching our learners in smaller, manageable chunks. We identified key component skills of intellectual and occupational wellness that would be taught to learners in individual 4MAT circles of their own. Dirksen’s Theory on Scaffolding was a valuable reference for this approach. Keeping the persona consistent through each circle helps establish continuity.
SCENARIOS
Our learning experience and the scenario that we developed are focused on aiding our learners to fill two major gaps. The first gap identified through user interviews is the limited understanding of what constitutes good health among our stakeholders. The second gap is the perception that aspects of intellectual and occupational wellness are subjective, difficult to learn and measure. Through our learning experience, our goal is to help our learners understand the different aspects of wellness, provide a tangible experience to reduce the abstract and subjective nature of wellness, and learn ways to improve intellectual and occupational wellness.
The scenario for our learning experience identifies a freshman student at CMU who considers himself to be healthy. He is introduced to the learning experience by his career advisor and uses the wellness charts and plots the wellness for a fictional character. He plays a role-playing game and learns how critical thinking and informed decision-making impacts wellness. He exists the game with ideas to improve his own wellness.
PROTOTYPE
Our final prototype took a digital form and comprised 3 major components.
Part 1: The first part of the experience was to understand the current perception of the learner about wellness and introduce them to the 8 dimensions of wellness. In this step, the learners click on the wellness wheel and learn about the different dimensions of wellness.
Part 2: The second part of the experience was to help the learner understand intellectual and occupational wellness. Career planning is an anxiety creating topic for students and to ease them into the process, learners can choose a personna which they relate to and go through the experience. A series of statements are provided about the fictional character and the learner can choose what they think about aspects of intellectual and occupational wellness. After 4 sets of questions, the overall wellness level of the persona is shown on a semantic differential scale. At present the scale is a digital one, but we hope that a physical form will be available to the learners to provide a tangible experience.
Part 3: The final part of the prototype is a role-playing game to help learners make career choices on behalf of a persona and learn how critical thinking skills and informed decision-making makes an impact on overall wellness.
EVALUATION METHODS
Throughout the learning experience design process, we used different evaluation methods to put our ideas to test and gather feedback. This helped in narrowing our focus and helped us iterate in the prototype development. The following evaluation methods were used.
- User Survey: Our initial focus was to create a learning experience to prioritize physical health over career and academic goals. We carried out user surveys of our stakeholder group and identified that there is a gap in knowledge about overall wellness and there are fewer resources available. We used the results from the user survey analysis to pivot towards holistic wellness.
2. Speed Dating: Using the speed dating technique we identified the gaps in some of the facets of our learning experience like the length of the experience, its seamless transitions, and motivation for the user to go through the experience. The feedback from students from the other group helped us refine our scenario ideas and the prototype. A sample idea used for speed dating is shown below
3. User Testing of Prototypes: Our initial prototype was tested with our peers and we received valuable feedback to improve the prototype. The main feedback was about the transition between physical and digital aspects of the experience. It was also brought to our notice that it’s not clear why the learner should use the ‘Wellthy’ app. There was feedback related to design aspects, game rules and the relevance of a fixed persona. We took into consideration all the feedback and got back to the drawing boards to modify our learning experience.
4. Game Simulation with Team: Based on the feedback from the user testing phase, we tried out multiple versions of the prototype and simulated the experience within our team members. Our main focus was to reduce the clutter in the app and provide a seamless experience for the learner. It was also important to update the language used in the app to make it more personable and less prescriptive.
STUDY OUTCOMES
The design process starting from stakeholder mapping to the user testing of prototypes showed the importance of different facets of learning as understood using various learning theories. It became clear that a good idea or a noble purpose alone is not sufficient to entice the learner and requires multiple aspects of learning to be met. The following were the findings from our study
- Storytelling effectively aids in Memory retention and grabbing the attention of learners
- While handling topics that cover sensitive and anxiety-inducing content using a Persona can help the learners and personalizing these personas will get the learner more involved in the process.
- The language used in a learning experience needs to be more conversational and less prescriptive.
- Wellness and health are not easily quantifiable and it is better to avoid quantifying them without strong research backing the approach. Providing a more open approach will avoid alienating the learners.
NEXT STEPS
The prototype is in digital form at present. The future steps can be categories in 3 ways:
- Improving the existing prototype:
a. The first step is to create the physical artifacts for the Wellthy board (Wellness chart) and the semantic differential to plot the change in wellness levels in the game and for the learner
b. It would also improve the experience by introducing more customization options to the persona used throughout the learning experience. This would make the experience more relatable and relevant to the learner. - Developing later part of the experience
a. The next step would be to develop the next part of the experience, i.e. to do a vision boarding exercise and create a current and preferred state for occupational wellness for the learner.
b. The next step would be to create additional experiences for other dimensions of wellness in order to cater towards holistic wellness. - Continuous improvement
a. Set reminders in the app to prompt the learner to try out newer modules at different points of their lives.
BROADER APPLICATION
Improving holistic wellness is an underrated but important goal to be pursued by everyone. The skills learned as part of improving wellness have implications on other aspects of life. By enabling a student to take charge of their wellness journey, we expect their peers and family members to start seeing wellness as an aspirational goal and start moving towards it rather than focusing narrowly about their physical and mental health alone.
