PeerUp

Flexible, anonymous, and free peer-to-peer mental health support at campuses nation-wide.

ROLE

UX Designer

TEAM

Aaron Shi, Anmonpreet Kaur, Arpit Jalan, Aryan Patel, Aye Pyae*, Deya Raghavan*, Janessa Pong, Jennifer Chen, Juskeerat Anand, Justin Nerhood, Tracy Zhao

*designers

SCOPE

7 weeks, Fall Quarter 2021

RESPONBILITIES

UX Research, UX Design

TOOLS

Figma, Photoshop, InVision

THE CHALLENGE

There are too many different platforms for PeerUp services and students seeking support experience long waiting times.

The Solution

A webapp with all 3 services integrated into one platform where students can directly connect with supporters

Initial Design Thinking

Target Users:

Students seeking anonymous mental health support
Supporters wanting to make a positive impact on students

Research Methodology:

Given our short timeline, I opted to dedicate a meeting to one-on-one user interviews with a supporter and admin. They were able to help us understand the pain points that they experienced after being a longtime supporter. They were also very knowledgeable about the user base and gave us key insights to better design for our range of users.

Insights

There are too many different platforms for chatting (Telegram, Wechat, Zoom) and supporters don’t know which platforms students have dropped in to; students wait without knowing when supporters will come.

Solution: create a direct link to a feedback form after the chat ends

Supporters rely on feedback forms from students, but feel as if it's too awkward to ask students after ending a chat.

Solution: supporters get a notification as soon as a student requests them

Wireframing + User Flows

We used low fidelity prototypes to define the user experiences.

Final Design

Onboarding Experience

Student Experience

Supporter Experience

Next Steps:

We hope to add new features as suggested by our partners at PeerUp. These features include chat box improvements, conducting more user testing, and adding a flow for admin users. Our endgoal is to launch PeerUp at campuses nationwide!

If I were to revisit this project, I would get an earlier start on user testing. Given the timeline, we could not dedicate as much time as we hoped to user testing and research. However, we were able to gain user insights by doing one-on-one interviews and by looking at user data. Hopefully we can revisit this research and aim to make PeerUp more inclusive and accessible.

2022 Update:

I am currently working on implementing more features this quarter! Stay tuned to see new updates.