Family Wellness Initiative
A holistic approach to wellbeing
Challenge
The Environmental Charter School (ECS) was struggling to communicate with parents during the pandemic.
Outcome
We created a set of tools to help families manage pandemic-related stressors and build skills for long-term wellbeing.
My Role
Visual design
Research
Wireframing
Prototyping
Timeline
5 weeks
Team
Sian Sheu
Melissa Cagan
Ivar Dameron
02.
Define
Inserting into a service blueprint
1. Discover
We began by investigating where communication pain points existed and how they were experienced on both ends. We collected data from interviews with school administrators, parent focus groups, survey analysis, and secondary research.
Stress and communication
We plotted our research findings onto an affinity diagram, which allowed
us to to see emerging patterns and themes. Stress emerged as a constant in fueling negative communications.
There is a cyclical connection between household stress levels and compassionate communication. In our solution, we decided to center this lived dynamic.
2. Define
Following our insights, we reframed our question as:
How might we improve the social and emotional well-being of students and caregivers of ECS?
3. Ideate
We began brainstorming interventions that could address intersecting pain points. Our process included mapping out connections between ideas.
Our ideation led us to the Family Wellness Initiative — a holistic approach to helping parents and students manage educational and life stressors exacerbated by the pandemic.
A note on mindfulness (n.)
Why mindfulness? Our team found that it is more than a trend; mindfulness is a research-backed skill that can play a huge role in regulating emotions and household stress levels.
Style guide
The look and feel of our system needed to be fun for children and resonate with adults. We created a visual style that is simple, engaging, and intentional.
Warm + vibrant
Fun + sophisticated
Simple + intentional
4. Develop
The Mindful Deck
Making mindfulness fun and interactive through a gamefied experience, the Mindful Deck is a set of 36 front-and-back activity cards for kids and families.
Wireframing
Activities cultivate compassion, focus, and calm.
Mindful Kids
The Mindful Kids app is an engaging educational tool for tablets. Mindful Kids supports the Mindful Deck by tracking emotional development and encouraging independent skills development.
Wireframing
1. Emotional check-ins help develop emotional intelligence, set expectations for themselves, and create intentions for the day.
2. On the landing page, users can explore a visualization of how their emotions have changed over time.
3. Simple navigation along the bottom enables toggling between subjects
Key interactions
With the needs of its audience at the forefront, Mindful Kids features bright colors, simple navigation, and minimal text that makes it easy and fun to use.
4. Friendly illustrations make learning approachable and familiar.
5. Audio and video allows kids to focus on absorbing the material, regardless of age and reading ability.
6. Bottom-bar navigation is stripped to its basics, easy to locate, and intuitive.
User flow
5. Deliver
Our final deliverables included a presentation, handover files, process documentation, and an implementation guide.
The client emphasized our proactive mindset, holistic approach, and creative problem-solving. Our solution tackled a temporary problem with a system that has a long-term horizon of impact.
Through this project, I learned a lot about collaborating with other designers. I'm proud of the design risks my team took to deliver an unexpected, thoughtful, and delightful project to the client.