IXD303 Healthcare Project : Further Research for my Product Idea

My Idea

For last week’s lecture I came up with idea of design a product (app most likely) for college students or users aged 18-25 for learning to look after them selves away from home again or getting back into a healthy routine when having a tough time with stress from their degree or just struggling with mental health generally as it’s such a pertinent issue.

When I came in this idea wasn’t super fully formed as much as it was a vague direction I had but after framing it as I design question and discussing my idea both with Paul and the members of my research group. I felt like I had a clearer direction of what I wanted to do.

Researching College Students Health and Wellbeing

So I continued doing research but now with a more focused direction. I went the same way about it as the last few weeks, adding things I find to miro, but this time I was focused specifically on health and wellbeing in relation to 18-25 year olds (or GenZ if you will) and the college experience. You can find my miro board here.

 

 

Take Aways

As I suspected there would some alarming mental health statistics and so there were. My research proved to me that there is a serous mental health crisis among college students, actually more so than teens. I did find some possible solution as like I thought there are aspects of health and wellbeing that are sometimes neglected by institutions and very often the students themselves when struggling and stressed out. As well as that, flus and colds are very common among students and getting sick like that often, from personal experience, can very often be attributed to stress and not looking after your body right, so my app idea could help with that too.

I sketched out a little brainstorm diagram and then i also wrote out some possible features and content to include in my app based on my findings.

Does it Need to Exist?

So I got some decent validation of my idea through looking at statistics but what matters is if my product idea would actually help solve these problem so I asked some of my peers, classmates and friends studying a variety of different degrees mostly what they thought of my idea and the response was generally positive and most said that they could see it being of help to them or someone they know. So with that I came to the conclusion that yes, a product like this should exist in the world and so I could get to designing, which is what I’m gonna get started with next week.

 

 

 

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