Flourish is an app developed by Flourish Science, a public benefit AI startup founded by Stanford behavioral scientists. The app is a science-based AI coach that encourages users to complete daily activities that can improve their happiness, wellbeing, and help with personal growth. Some of the activities include a custom well-being insights page that visually depicts the user’s happiness strengths and weaknesses and analyzes results from the past 7 days, a daily check-in feature that allows users to reflect on their mood and prompts them to interact with Sunnie – the mental health-AI support buddy, and prompted wellness activities like nature walks, and gratitude letter writing.
Flourish Science noticed that while their app was well received by the general public, they had lower retention rates among college student aged individuals. Some users would use the app briefly, but drop off afterwards, making Flourish Science realize that they needed to find a way to better personalize the app to engage or attract college students more.
My team was tasked with conducting research on UC Berkeley students to discover pain points regarding mental wellbeing resources on campus and developing a solution based on our findings to increase retention rate among college students for the Flourish App. My role in this project was the UX research lead and designer.
This section is about discovering and understanding the user's needs, goals, and pain points. I had some goals in mind when I planned out my research process.
I sent out a user survey using Google Forms and tabled on campus on Sproul Plaza to reach out to students. I received 28 responses. Here is the demographics and a summary of the findings:
Limitations and assumptions: The survey was only able to reach students who were walking to class though Sproul and students that were a part of clubs and organizations that my team is a part of. I assumed that these students would be representative of the rest of the students on campus.
After analyzing the findings from the survey, I conducted 7 user interviews with students to gain deeper insights about their individual experiences and challenges. Here is the demographics of the students:
Most students mentioned how reaching out to friends and family are most beneficial in helping reduce their stress from school.
Students spend most of their time waiting to access mental health resources on campus when they feel they need help causing them to feel unsupported.
Most students brought up how packed and busy their schedules are, making it difficult for them to find time to reach out to others for help.
Here’s what some of the students said after trying the Flourish app.
I want more social features because when I'm feeling mentally unwell, my world feels small. It’s helpful to see what other people are doing.
I enjoy how the app guides me through doing the activities. It makes the process calming.
Being able to collaborate with other users when doing activities would motivate me to use the app more.
It would be helpful to have a way to track all the activities I have done on the app to see my progress and accomplishments.
Sophomore at UC Berkeley
At this stage our team narrowed down the project scope based on the insights I gained from users. Because of the shorter timeline for this project, we focused on designing a single feature.
How might we improve the Flourish app to better meet the needs of college students to improve user engangement and increase retention?
To address the users pain points and the HMW question, our team decided to design a scrapbook feature within Flourish.The scrapbook feature would let users like Aliyah:
Based on Aliyah’s goals and needs, the feature should:
What steps Aliyah takes before, during and after her involvement with the app.
I worked with another designer to sketch some user flows and early wireframe ideas.
All of our research and ideas finally come together in the final designs. Figma was the design tool used and the components and style guide all followed an existing design system and brand identity given by Flourish Science.
Users can see all their progress compiled in one centralized area.
Users can personalize the page and design the scrapbook however they want.
User can share and send their scrapbook pages to other people to share memories, which strengthens relationships.
This was my first project working with an industry partner through UC Berkeley's Fung Fellowship. Over the course of the semester, our team encountered several obstacles, such as difficulties recruiting for user interviews and deciding on a feasible solution that could be presented at the end of our 12 weeks. Although it was chaotic at some moments, this project taught me the importance of being adaptable. After conducting qualitative and quantitative research and gathering insights in order to learn from students facing challenges regarding their mental wellbeing, I gained a strong grasp on how to evaluate and synthesize the users' pain points and decide which areas needed to be focused on the most. Although I didn't have enough time to conduct enough usability testing. I was able to interview 2 students about the idea and received positive feedback. As we handoff this project to Flourish Science, I want to thank them for their support and guidance throughout this project.