Developing a Mental Health and Wellness App for College Students
This case study documents the research process conducted to inform the development of a mobile app that connects UC San Diego students with mental health and wellness resources on campus.
This is an NDA limited case study. Some details are omitted to protect the agreement, but key elements of the research process are highlighted to provide an overview.
Role
Product Research Intern
Jr. Product Manager
Timeline
July 2023 - March 2024
Methods
Generative research
Workshops
In-depth interviews
Surveys
Service blueprint
Tools
Qualtrics
Figma
Miro
Airtable
OVERVIEW
The Joan & Irwin Jacobs Center for Health Innovation (JCHI) at UC San Diego Health was founded in 2021 with the goal of accelerating the development of technologies and digital health tools that improve healthcare delivery both inside and outside the clinic. One of JCHI’s primary initiatives was to address the mental health and wellness needs of UC San Diego students by developing a mental health and wellness app that provides on-demand access to critical resources on campus, removing barriers to mental health and wellness.
BACKGROUND & CHALLENGE
Between 2022 and 2023, UC San Diego housed more than 40,000 students. While 1:1 counseling is limited, the university provides a wide range of mental health and wellness services, including group therapy and self-care workshops, which research shows can effectively address mental health issues early. Building on this evidence and the stepped care model, JCHI wanted to co-design with students a platform that would increase awareness of these services and reduce the need for more resource-intensive treatments.
MY ROLE
As a product research intern, I played a key role in the discovery phase of the project. My primary responsibilities included:
Conducting in-depth interviews with health experts from UC San Diego to understand student’s use of health and wellness services on campus
Developing and facilitating discovery workshops to explore feature ideas
Designing and shipping surveys
Creating a comprehensive service blueprint of UC San Diego mental health and wellness related services
Generating data-driven design recommendations
After the internship, I took on the role of Jr. Product Manager. During that time, my involvement in the project evolved beyond research tasks to include a stronger focus on roadmap and product strategy development and facilitating collaboration between designers, developers, and various stakeholders.
RESEARCH PROCESS
In the first phase of our research process, we conducted ideation and assumption-mapping workshops, as well as interviews and surveys. These activities allowed us to explore the problem space and better understand students’ needs and preferences regarding mental health and wellness.
In-Depth Interviews and Stakeholder Workshops
Through stakeholder interviews and workshops with health providers from UC San Diego, we validated our knowledge of existing services. I led 1:1 interviews to explore the functioning of clinical and non-clinical health services from the provider's perspective, and designed and facilitated a stakeholder workshop that included brainstorming activities and prioritization exercises.
The insights gained through these activities allowed us to create a comprehensive service blueprint that mapped the relationships between different services’ components and processes.
DEMAND FOR SERVICES → There is limited demand for alternatives to one-on-one therapy. However, students who participate in services like group therapy generally report high satisfaction and positive experiences.
COMMUNICATION AND SCHEDULING → Many services lack automated processes for communication and scheduling, resulting in a higher manual workload and a fragmented experience for both providers and students.
FRAGMENTED ANALYTICS → The diverse range of systems used across health departments and centers limits the ability to monitor cases and understand outcomes at a large scale.
2. Student Survey
With a clearer understanding of the services UC San Diego offers, we shifted our focus to the students themselves. We designed a survey to explore their perceptions of mental health and preferences for wellness services. Over 300 students participated, providing us with valuable insights:
→ Most respondents were unaware of alternatives to one-on-one therapy and reported using mental health apps, telehealth, and self-care practices as their primary methods for managing mental health and wellness.
→ Of the students using campus mental health services, 72% engaged exclusively in one-on-one therapy, while the remaining 28% used alternative services such as workshops, peer support programs, and group therapy.
→ A significant majority of respondents expressed interest in receiving notifications about mental health and wellness resources.
→ Many students reported irregular participation in wellness activities due to their busy schedules.
3. Co-Design and Ideation Workshop with Students
The survey data revealed important pain points and potential opportunities. To further explore these topics, we facilitated a co-design and ideation workshop with students. This provided us with rich qualitative insights regarding students’ mental health and wellness challenges, while also allowing us to collaboratively brainstorm solutions for our platform.
DESIGN RECOMMENDATIONS
After analyzing and triangulating the insights from our workshops and survey, we crafted a set of recommendations that informed the prototyping of our platform’s core features.
We prioritized broad functionalities over feature details, ensuring the app met both users’ needs and business goals. Here are some of our main recommendations:
DATA AGGREGATOR → Students lack knowledge of the mental health and wellness services offered beyond individual therapy. Create an aggregator that recommends on-campus resources based on personal preferences.
SCHEDULING TOOL → Students struggle with time management, making it challenging to allocate time for wellness activities. Provide a scheduling feature that streamlines the process of planning for mental health and wellness events.
INCENTIVES → The demand for 1:1 therapy exceeds the availability of counselors, while other resources remain underused. Encourage students to engage in a variety of events beyond 1:1 therapy by incentivizing specific actions.
IDEATION & DESIGN
Design, research and development teams are currently working together in the creation of user flows, IA diagrams that visualize the app’s user experience, and feature specifications. Given the complexity of integrating various services across campus that run on different API’s and use different authentication methods, visualizing the different navigation paths within the app is key to understand technical requirements and identify areas where the integration of services might pose challenges or create friction for users.
Future steps involve developing wireframes, solidifying the branding and design system of the app and working with dev in scalability strategies and the implementation of monitoring and analytics tools to gather insights about user interactions.
WHAT I LEARNED
Embrace Change
Iteration is key to the process of product development, and this project really underscored the importance of iterating, especially at the intersection of research and design. While our core mission of enhancing students’ well-being remained the same, our findings led us to revise and refine our ideas and research methods multiple times.
End-To-End Product Development
In contrast to previous projects, where I focused my research on specific features, this project exposed me to the entire product development life cycle, from ideation and planning to design, development, testing, and launch. This was an invaluable opportunity that allowed me to apply diverse research methods at various stages of the development process.
Collaboration
I cannot overstate the significance of cross-collaboration in this project. None of this work would have been possible without the expertise of the engineers, designers, health experts and scientists I collaborated with.