Lead Visual Designer,
UI / UX Design and Researcher
Social Prescribing is a healthcare method that connects patients to non-clinical services in their communities to improve well-being (World Health Organization Regional Office for the Western Pacific 2022). These are often creative activities which generate community engagement, health and wellness, and life fulfillment.
The U.S. is currently experiencing a mental health crisis, but there're a shortage of mental health professionals. Societal and health inequities directly contribute to lowered health and well-being (World Health Organization Regional Office for the Western Pacific 2022), but social prescriptions are often inaccessible to individuals without healthcare.
To address the lack of awareness and accessibility surrounding healthcare in the United States. There needs to be an autonomous space for individuals / general public who seek to better their health through community interaction, without the dependence of the U.S. healthcare system itself. See our Final Project Report for more information (external link).
Our team created a prototype of a free-to-use mobile app called Bloop. This app aims to introduce local/virtual events based on social prescribing models, and provide informational resources. The services offered by Bloop provide options for users to improve their overall well-being by registering for events and activities that spark their interests.Activities offered by Bloop are meant to foster community, build connections, engage users with their hobbies, while also giving marginalized groups a safe space. Rather than needing to see a health professional to get prescribed a social prescription, Bloop’s events are both 1) accessible to individuals and 2) can be used as a source for health professionals when recommending social prescribing options to their patients.While this app isn’t going to solve the systemic health inequities that are at play, it is a chance to bridge information that would otherwise be inaccessible to some.
Because Bloop caters to a diverse audience in terms of age and personality, preferences and interests are asked of the users for future event recommendations during profile creation. By using AI, this ensures that the activities supplement the users' journey to better health in the most optimal and personal way.
Users can browse for events (including recommended/ popular events), use filters, see past events, and search for events on the home screen. To strengthen community involvement, events are allowed to be posted by any organization. To provide credibility, events hosted by ‘verified organizations’ (health professionals, nonprofits, etc) are indicated with a green checkmark. The events list the event type: activity/interests, setting, health concerns they help address, etc to promote event transparency.
The users register for an event with a single click, and optionally add it to their calendar to receive reminders leading up to the event, and new events they might want to attend. Notifications can be accessed at the top right of the home page with the bell icon. Upcoming events will be displayed at the top of the home page so the user can access them quickly. Once an event is completed, users can optionally complete a reflection to track personal progress.
The user can browse resources on the resource page, which are in video and article format. The user can optionally filter these resources based on mood and the kind of guidance required. Helpful articles and events that users might want to revisit by “bookmarking” them in the saved icon on the toolbar. These saved resources can be accessed from the Saved tab (indicated by the bookmark icon on the toolbar) in the navigation menu.The user can edit their interests, account settings, and easily access their event reflections on their profile page.
Our design problem followed CHI 2023 Student Design Competition of Good-Health and Wellbeing. We spent a long time narrowing down which topics were important to us as a team. Answering the prompt of how can we better wellness and wellbeing isn't something we can solve with just a simple, one track solution because a healthy lifestyle is unique to each individual person.
I thought about my graphic design job at the Center for Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida, and one of their largest research initiatives is bringing social prescribing models to the U.S. After proposing to the team that we could expand upon this growing form of research by making this information available to the public (and target existing constraints of accessibility), we decided that this was one way to universally target health and wellbeing - by fostering healthy communities.
User needs included:
These personas were directly based off the interviewee data we collected during our initial research. There were specific motivations, frustrations, and context that we wanted to target when defining Bloop's major functions.
For example, when developing our primary user Nathan’s biography, we noticed that his aspiration is to attend credible interactive events, which we incorporated into our features with 'verified checkmarks.' We also decided to highlight the type of the event to cater to individual needs, such as the event is interactive or quiet.
In Ava’s biography, we realized Bloop could function as a way to help her mental health, but she still needed to see a health professional. By defining Ava as a secondary user, we added a secondary post-event follow-up function which provides local resources leading Ava to professional treatment.
The scenarios helped us shed light onto the target users' back-stories and motivations through detailed descriptions and realistic situations for the users. They explained how and why users need to interact with certain solutions in order to address their motivations/goals and frustrations, which helped us centralize focus when supporting our potential user interface designs.
One of our interviewees had limited access to quality healthcare and waited months to receive healthcare service, while plenty of people in the U.S. don't have health insurance at all. We realized our app could be used as an informational source for people in similar situations, who are looking for professional and credible recommendations for self-treatment methods. These scenarios benefit us by looking back at the persona in a sequence of user actions. It further generates design features, describes users' behavioral examples physically and digitally, and systematically allows for all the team members to understand the users’ practical needs and actions.
I explored various typefaces and colors for Bloop's visual design and branding guide. I wanted to convey a welcoming and accessible atmosphere, so the sans-serif Nunito was chosen.
The 4 colors were picked to give the interface a visually striking, bold, and vibrant feeling. They are bold colors, yet are still soft, and work perfectly for an empowering, health + well-being application.
Bone, J. K., Fancourt, D., Sonke, J., Fluharty, M., Cohen, R., Lee, J., … Bu, F. (2022, August 2). Creative leisure activities, mental health, and wellbeing during five months of the COVID-19 pandemic: A fixed effects analysis of data from 3,725 US adults.
Jacobson, W. (2022, March 29). Social Prescribing in the USA: On the Rise?. Visible Network Labs. Retrieved September 10, 2022.
Kodner, S., & Fletcher, Z. (2022, June 16). Dancing away the loneliness: In the UK, social prescriptions help fight isolation during the pandemic. The World. Retrieved September 10, 2022.
Morse DF, Sandhu S, Mulligan K, et al. Global developments in social prescribing. BMJ Global Health 2022;7:e008524. doi:10.1136/ bmjgh-2022-008524.
Odeh R, Diehl ERM, Nixon SJ, Tisher CC, Klempner D, Sonke JK, et al. (2022). A pilot randomized controlled trial of group-based indoor gardening and art activities demonstrates therapeutic benefits to healthy women. PLoS ONE 17(7): e0269248.
World Health Organization Regional Office for the Western Pacific. License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. (2022, May 20). A toolkit on how to implement Social Prescribing. Retrieved September 10, 2022.
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