UniBoost: The App that Makes a Difference (Oct 2018-May 2019)
- Jul 8, 2020
- 3 min read
UniBoost is a preventative wellbeing app designed for students by students. This was a third year Innovation project where we created an awareness campaign, wireframe and business plan.
I worked in a transdisciplinary team of three from anthropology, computer science and psychology (myself) on this project. It was borne out of mutual concern from first-hand experience of student wellbeing at university.
Our problem statements:
“Students need better wellbeing support"
"Universities need cost effective solutions to student wellbeing fund placement"
Our Solution:
Our solution to these problems was to create an accessible platform for students that will provide preventative measures for mental health deterioration. The platform will help students to connect with their university, their city and reflect on their wellbeing. The aim of the app is to get students to align their mental health and wellbeing with their other priorities at university. Our app will also benefit the university, as it provides a cost and time-effective partial solution to the university’s mental health obstacles.
My Role:
Due to my core discipline being in psychology, I take a largely human-centred approach to our projects. In the initial stages of our project, my main role on this project was to conduct user-research to gain valuable insights to inform the journey to our final ideas and products.
Research Methods and Skills:
-Secondary Research
-Interviews
-Surveys
-Wellbeing Study- challenges prototype
-Usability Study
-Instagram interaction analysis
-Online Communication
-Communicating to an audience
-Emotional Intelligence
-Storyboarding
Figure 1: This is the awareness campaign that we aimed at students following the 'challenges' feature of our app. Although wellbeing is a sensitive topic I chose to market our app in a humorous way to show students that looking after their wellbeing should be fun and everyday, not just when it is poor.
The Wellbeing study:
This was a study that I designed to validate some of the key aspects that we wanted to include in the 'challenges' aspect of our app. This feature was designed to give students 15 minute wellbeing tasks. For the study I recruited 25 students for a week long study. Every morning I would send encouraging messages combined with a 15 minute wellbeing task (validated through secondary research). Every evening I would send 6 questions regarding the individual's mood before and after the task, whether they enjoyed the task, what their motivation were for completing it and whether they would do something similar again. The study helped us validate students' engagement with technology, which tasks were most effective for improving their wellbeing, their patterns of motivation and their general feedback about the process.
Awareness Campaign:
From our research we identified two markets for our awareness campaign: the adopters (universities) and the users (students). From this we created a two-pronged approach to our campaign to suit our target audiences.
For the university we created an informative website for our campaign, using formal language and showing the validation of our idea (https://rachelkirby8.wixsite.com/uniboost); we also created an informative video explaining each feature backed up with evidence from our interviews with professionals and secondary research.
For the students we created a fun campaign driven by the social aspects of our app through social media, such as Instagram ( https://www.instagram.com/springback321/ ). This is because we found that this is one of the best ways to engage students. We also created a video that is lighthearted and humorous, appealing to the positive lifestyle associated with our app.
Business Plan:
Once we had identified our problem and validated our solution we moved on to creating a business plan for our idea.
Within the business plan I primarily focussed on the marketing aspects of our venture. I did a competitor analysis, using our potential point-of-differences, of similar ventures available to students, such as headspace and the Big White Wall. I used both bottom-up and top-down methods to identify our market volume.
I completed a thorough risk analysis of our idea, considering a number of political, social and financial potentialities and what our contingencies for these issues would be.
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