Unsocial Donut
CAPSTONE PROJECT 2019-2020
An anonymous social networking application that helps people who are worried about being judged or evaluated build connections by giving them control over how much they reveal.
The Challenge
People with social anxiety tend to fear and avoid social situations. They are concerned about embarrassing themselves or being judged for their actions. It is normal to feel anxious in social settings, but it can manifest as a serious constraint when it starts getting in the way of the individual’s ability to function and enjoy life. The intent is to aid users in learning how to manage and overcome anxiety before it starts affecting their lives.
The Approach
The project began with research, the objective of which was assessing the effects of social anxiety among individuals in the 18-29 year age range. These individuals are in a transitional phase of their life and wish to contain their anxiety for a better life. Intensive primary and secondary research was carried out - with desk research, 1-1 interviews and surveys to gain insights and better understand potential users. Using these insights, we built affinity maps and customer journey maps to synthesize the data we collected to identify unmet user needs and opportunities for interventions. We then generated many ideas through workshops and brainstorming sessions. Low fidelity prototypes were created and tested with various users to check for effectiveness, usability, etc. We continuously built-on and iterated the solution based on user feedback. Finally, we created an engaging and delightful mobile application that tackles the identified problem.
THE PROCESS
EMPATHIZING
Exploring the Human Context
“Only 5% of 15 million people seek treatment.”
We started with trying to understand social anxiety in the wider context by doing in-depth research about various mental health issues and learning the magnitude of social anxiety in today’s world.
We learnt that social anxiety is a common occurrence and the second most frequently diagnosed anxiety disorder. It could be inherited, caused by physical, sexual, emotional abuse, bullying or family history. The disorder typically originates during childhood or early adolescence and is rarely seen to occur after age 25.
What is social anxiety?
To better understand the space we are working in, we conducted secondary research and collected data from academic papers, white papers, industry studies, news articles and videos.
Social anxiety disorder, also called social phobia, is intense anxiety or fear of being negatively judged, evaluated, or rejected in a social or performance environment. It is a chronic condition as it does not go away on its own.
What is the cost of social anxiety on human life?
Imposes substantial economic costs on individuals, their families and society
Poor educational attainment and achievement
Loss of work productivity
Functional disability
Social impairment
Greater financial dependency
Poor quality of life
What do people do to overcome social anxiety?
Talk to friends and family
Social anxiety medication is useful for many, but not all individuals suffering from the disorder
Medication without the use of active, structured cognitive-behavioral therapy has no long-term benefits. Only direct cognitive-behavioral therapy can alter the mind, and help people overcome social anxiety.
One of the big changes in the last decade is the gradual non-use of medication by people seeking active therapy for social anxiety.
Why don’t people seek treatment?
Individuals think that social anxiety is part of their personality and cannot be changed
Lack of recognition of the condition by healthcare professionals
Stigmatization of mental health services
Fear of being negatively evaluated by a healthcare professional
General lack of information about the availability of effective treatments
Limited availability of services in many areas.
DEFINE
Defining the Research Question
The information we found in our desk research gave us a solid starting point to define our research question and help guide subsequent primary research.
We learnt that people with social anxiety tend to fear and avoid social situations. They are concerned about embarrassing themselves or being judged for their actions. It is normal to feel anxious in social settings from time to time.
Social anxiety becomes a problem when it becomes quite distressing and starts getting in the way of an individuals ability to function and enjoy life. Therefore, the goal is to learn to manage anxiety, not necessarily to eliminate it.
Since social anxiety is such a wide topic, we narrowed down our scope of research. The purpose of our research was to assess the symptoms and effects of social anxiety among 18-29 year olds, who have just made a new transition in life.
RESEARCH, OBSERVE & UNDERSTAND
Key Insights
Based on our secondary research, we had a lot of assumptions. Through our research, we wanted to create hypothesis around these assumptions, reach conclusions and discover unknown insights to invent possible futures.
We gathered information from users by way of a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, including surveys, one-on-one interviews, contextual inquiries and diary studies to understand users and discover underlying insights and opportunities to better inform our solution.
Survey
We started with a quantitative survey on Qualtrics to gain insights quickly about the preferences, attitudes, and opinions of people dealing with social anxiety. We posted the survey to online forums and social anxiety groups on Facebook and Reddit to solve for any selection bias at the type of user who will fill out our survey. We received 223 responses in total and here are some of the results.
1:1 Interviews
We then moved on to conduct one-on-one interviews with various stakeholders from people who think they are dealing with social anxiety, people who have been clinically diagnosed with social anxiety, psychologists, and therapists. This helped us gain a deeper understanding of our user’s journey and thought process.
Conducting interviews after the survey was a predetermined decision, as we wanted to gain explanations for the survey answers. The online survey (quantitative method) is a great way for answering questions about how many and how much whereas interviews (qualitative method) are better for answering questions about why or how to fix a problem.
Affinity Mapping
After collecting all the data through our research, we started synthesizing our findings to discover insights and patterns among our user’s behaviors and motivations. Eventually, these insights informed the decisions we made about the design and development of the final solution.
Journey Mapping
We then used these insights to create journey maps of the user to provide us with a holistic view of the user experience, feelings and opportunity areas. This enabled us to uncover moments of both frustration and delight throughout the journey and realize at what point we could intervene efficiently to address our user’s pain points, alleviate fragmentation, and, ultimately, create a better experience for them.
To narrow down our opportunity area, we narrowed down our target audience further to 18-22 year olds, going in depth into what they feel, why they feel this way and subsequent opportunities that we leverage.
Experience Mapping
Refining the opportunity area - How might we.. ?
Since social anxiety is such a vast problem space, and every experience is different and unique to each individual, we were met with the challenge of how to build something that is useful for each of these people.
Our journey maps gave us a clear understanding of the problems faced by young adults facing social anxiety, we noted down all the symptoms our target group faced. We noted that these symptoms may hold true for every single person, whether they are or aren’t clinically diagnosed for social anxiety.
We then spoke to our users, to ask and understand which of these symptoms do they feel affects them the most. We picked 3 symptoms - ‘worry about being viewed as boring, stupid or awkward’, ‘reveal little about themselves when talking to others’ and ‘reluctant to express an opinion’. All these three symptoms complimented each other and had the most impact on people who were going through social anxiety between the ages of 18-22.
We realized all three symptoms boil down to judgement and expression. Using these insights, we wrote our ‘How Might We’ question to turn these challenges into opportunities for design. A properly framed How Might We doesn’t suggest a particular solution, but gives you the perfect frame for innovative thinking.
IDEATE
Brainstorming good and bad ideas
We held multiple ideation and brainstorming sessions where we used different techniques like ‘Brain Dumping’, ‘Brain Writing’, ‘Opposite Thinking’, ‘Build it. Break it. Fix it.’ to help us in our ideation sessions. Eventually, we took all these ideas and built on them, found ways to link concepts, recognized patterns and flipped seemingly impossible notions over to reveal new insights.
PROTOTYPE & TEST
We then picked 5 ideas that we believed would have the greatest impact and were excited about. We went on to create low-fidelity prototypes for all 5 ideas and test them with our users to gain feedback, continuously iterating on our final solution.
Introducing
UNSOCIAL DONUT
An anonymous social networking app
which helps Millennials and Gen Z
who are worried about being judged
or evaluated, build connections
while keeping their identities private
and only revealing their identity
when they feel confident and
comfortable.
We went out and showed this app to our users to get feedback about the product. Here are some things we heard.
“I love it! I would do it.”
“I see myself sharing something I don’t want to share with my family and friends, will want to talk to someone who is more relatable.”
“It touches on nostalgia for me, it makes you feel more connected.”
Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, Data Synthesis, Ideation, Prototyping, User Testing, Branding, UI Design
Parsons School of Design
Industry: Healthcare
Year: 2019-2020
Collaborators: Animesh Singh