bearsquare.

UI/UX Designer • Aug 2019 - Jan 2020 • Web Prototype • Figma

jeffrey

21 years old
Berkeley, CA
University Student

Needs:

How might we empower students to address their own mental health needs by connecting them with existing campus resources?

[re] define.


As a team of designers, we set out to destigmatize mental health issues on UC Berkeley's campus. After conducting user research by surveying students and reaching out to various campus organizations, we found that the key pain point of our main user group was a lack of centralized information about campus resources.

Our ethnographic demography methods showed that the majority of students had not heard of the resources that we found in various levels of our resource discovery. Further, of the students who did know about the resources, most had not used them. Therefore, our goal was to create a centralized way for students to find out about new resources, how to access them easily, and take the next step in caring for their own mental health by actively seeking out and using the available resources provided by our wider campus.

prototype

At a high level, we examined various campus mental health services to gain an understanding of the different approaches that campuses take toward improving student mental health and their efficacy. By looking at resources on campus, such as the Disable Students Program, Counseling and Psychological Services, and the Tang Center for Health, we quickly realized that there are many available resources. However, the quality of the resources did not correlate to their presence in students' minds, which brought forth the idea of an all-encompassing infographic.

We set out to destigmatize mental health on campus — not by creating a new resource, but by transforming the resources already available by increasing their perceived accessibility. We utilized the traditional design thinking process and carried the theme of empathy throughout each stage. As a team, we had many different perspectives and were also all trained for human subjects research, which we utilized as an ethnography method.

We conducted surveys to gauge the amount of mental health resources on campus students were aware of and how many resources students had actually utilized. We found that the majority of students hadn't heard of most mental health resources we found in our research. In addition, there seemed to be a barrier to access — the majority of students who did know about the resources hadn't used them. Student responses also showed appreciation for less-crowded spots, leading us to showcase lesser-known resources on campus that could be better utilized by the greater student community.

We wanted to create a sense of comfort and playfulness with the Bearsqaure brand. To reflect our goals of an interactive and fun tool to click around in, we created the Bearsquare logos. The two bears, to represent UC Berkeley students specifically, depict the idea of connection, which is our core theme of the tool.


From our initial objective to reduce stigma around mental health and wellness issues and increase student awareness of resources, we converged to create a widely accessible web tool. Through an infographic-style interactive prototype, our intention was to convey comfort through the Bearsquare branding, as well as a comprehensive tool that could be sustainably updated and upkept well into the future. The completed prototype features an interactive map of services on campus, details about where each service is located, and tips on how to access these resources.