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Minority + Support
People newly diagnosed with HIV frequently endure severe psychological distress, which could impact their medication adherence. Due to a lack of mental health professionals in China, the mental health needs of this highly vulnerable population are largely left unaddressed.
Turn to Sunshine provides brief psychological interventions based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to assist people with their mental health concerns. This research also intends to evaluate the task-sharing model for treating mental health needs in low-resource settings with the aid of professional nurses or lay mental health providers.
What did I do
This is a real project that was already released in Jun 2022. I was the team's researcher and designer. Based on the prior features and user interfaces, I evaluated and enhanced our program through a series of user tests.
Turning to Sunshine
HIV-positive persons experience deteriorating mental health. In addition, homosexual marriage is illegal in China, and MSM (men who have sex with men) face discrimination due to their sexual orientation and gender minority status.
Our CBT and DBT therapy systems are designed to assist patients in regulating their emotions, overcoming obstacles, and enhancing their physical and mental health.
HIV
Individuals’ mental health often plummets at the initial diagnosis of HIV. Depression, PTSD, and suicidal ideation are all very common upon HIV diagnosis. And all of these are associated with poor linkage to care and poor adherence to HIV medication.
MSM
HIV diagnosis adds to the pre-existing adversities among men who have sex with men (MSM). In China, HIV-positive MSM have a higher prevalence of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation than the general population. A lot of intersecting vulnerabilities contribute to the increased risk of mental health problems among this population.
CBT therapy
To deliver depression and adherence intervention for people who are newly diagnosed with HIV, we introduced CBT therapy.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT):
A form of psychological treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of mental illnesses.
Collaboration
the psychologist and patient/client work together to develop an understanding of the problem and to develop a treatment strategy.
“Homework”
CBT emphasizes self-therapy. Patients/clients acquire coping skills to shift their thinking, troublesome emotions, and behavior through in-session and "homework" exercises.
Current life
CBT focuses on the present, not the past. A certain amount of history is important, but the focus is on going forward to build better life skills.
User testing
To comprehend our users, we undertake 3 rounds of usability testing with a total of 10 participants. We improved our initial design by evaluating and analyzing raw data and insights and released the APP in September for beta testing.
After a brief introduction, we assigned participants five tasks and allowed them to complete them independently by observing their actions and soliciting their feedback in order to evaluate the processing's accessibility and usability. In the end, participants will fill out the System Usability Scale and Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire.
Main Page
Provides access to most of our features in the mini program, including podcast, emotion tracking, and medication recording.
Findings:
Due to the crowded interface, users stated they may have mistakenly tapped an icon. Moreover, first-time users may become discouraged since they need to know where to start.
Changes:
Mood Tracking and Medication Recording are moved to the top to shorten the navigation bar. Additionally, we emphasize the portion that users should begin with.
Podcast
This part is to show the podcast page. The main podcast page will show the podcast title, author name, the date created, preview sentence about the contents, and a corresponding illustration on the left side. Users can play the podcast, see the contents and have a quiz in general.
Findings:
Many users prefer a more intuitive learning process. Reading is inefficient, whereas listening requires no extra effort.
Changes:
We discarded text and designed a series of podcasts. So users can listen anytime, like before sleep.
Reporting
Emotion recording shows the swings of weekly emotions. The mood results comes from the homework in podcasts. In the backend, therapists could access to users’ data and know their mental health status.
Findings:
Users have low voluntary to finish the test after everyday homework. The mood graph lacks understandability.
Changes:
We combined homework and tests onto a single page so that people could immediately record their emotions after listening to our podcasts. We rebuilt the graph and assigned distinct colors to each level.
Tracking
This section displays medicine tracking in a calendar display and medicine tracking in a graph display so that people may see them.
Findings:
This design caused our participants some confusion. We discovered that users were only concerned with the day to take medicine instead of they day they did not.
Changes:
Instead of using diverse colors for annotation, we changed to concise it to red color only for “Forgot to Take.” We also added how people could access their previous data.
