Project Background
Mental health is as important as physical health. What’s different is that mental health is difficult to be measured. As the growing problem of the mental illness due to the busying life today, caring the mental health become a cricial issue nowadays. This inspired our team to look deeper into it and try to do something.
Introduction
EmoPal use the gamification method to help users building the habit of “self awarness”. Users can feed Emopal like feeding a pet, and the way to feed the robot is to write down some mood diaries. With more input, the robot will grow up, and at the same time, user’s EQ will also improve.
My Role
- Conducting in-depth interview
- Conducting the usability testing
- Designing the robot Mechanism
About Emotional Intelligence
Self-awareness
Self-awarness is the core element of Emotional Intelligence, and is defined as the ability to understand your own emotion as well as to recognize the impacts.
Self-management
Self-management is the ability to control impulsive feelings and behaviors, manage the emotions in healthy ways, follow through on commitments, and adapt to changing circumstances.
In-depth interview with experts
Zheng Shu Huei
Assistant Professor
Counseling and Wellness
Services Division (CWSD)
Yu Ruei Ling
Assistant Professor
Counseling and Wellness
Services Division (CWSD)
Besides empathy and listening, Counseling Psychologists have a set of tools to guide the counselee. The following are three core methods: narrate the problem, Interpret the incident, and Self-healing.
Narrate the problem: In this step, the counselee are asked to describe the problem concretely with “who, when, where, what, how, and why”
Interpret the incident: Counseling Psychologists will reconstruct the problem and guide the counselee to find out the key that causes the emotion.
Self-healing: After realizing how the emotion problem is caused, Counseling Psychologists will provide some suggestions base on other cases. Then, the most important thing is to let the counselee step by step heal themself.
Narrate the problem and interpret the incident process can benefit self-awareness ability, while self-healing can benefit self-management ability.
Orignal and ideal way to treat emotion
Counseling psychologist's method
Insight
- People normally do not emphasize EQ and just ignore the change of their mental health.
- People are lack of access to train their EQ
- The current way to train EQ takes too much effort, which make it hard to become a long-lasting behavior
Difficulty of treating the emotion problems properly
Value statement
" Emopal is for people in stress, offering an EQ training program that is simple, interesting, and effective, aiming to improve the EQ of the public “
Design concepts
Provided a third-person view
Based on the insight that people normally ignore mental health. We propose a “third-person view” idea, creating a character that gives users feedback, which helps users to be aware of their emotions change.
Simplify the EQ training
We want to simplify the EQ training process to let users conduct it only with the assistance of our product. At the same time, the training method should still base on the profession, making sure that it is effective.
The system
Our team design an EQ training system, combining a robot and an APP. The system acts like the user’s pal, accompanying users to improve their self-awareness and self-management ability.
Robot Design
Emopal uses facial recognition technology to tell people’s emotional status, and it will demonstrate different animations to remind users when their emotion change. The different animation depends on which emotion is detected. As a minimum viable product (MVP), we categorize emotion into three basic statuses: Happy, Sad, and Angry.
Plus, Emopal has its own mood. Similar to taking care of pets, if users interact more with the robot, the robot will be in a better mood. This design aims to increase the frequency and persistence of interaction between users and Emopal since EQ training is a long-lasting process.
Emopal can behave different moods very naturally just like a human because three motors inside its body can separately controll the face-turning and the heads position. The LCD screen on the robot’s face shows its expression.
App Design
When designing the App, we work closely with two Counseling Psychologists that we interview before to make sure the training way is effective. We applied “mood diary”, a Counseling Psychologists’ training method, on the APP, making the original unaccessible psychotherapy into a daily-life activity.
Recording emotions /Mood diary
When Emopal detects the mood changes, the App will guide users to write down their feeling in the structure of mood diary, which helps users to improve Self-awareness and Self-management abilities. After doing the mood diary practice again and again, users will learn to control their mood when facing bad things in the future.
Mood statistic
Users can check their own mood-changing history, and see the statistic by days, months, or years. This helps users to evaluate short-term and long-term mood changes.
Friend's mood network
Users can also check their close friend’s mood status and mood diary, giving “claps” and “hugs” or even messaging them.
Store
Whenever users open this APP and interact with others, they will earn points. Users can use the points to buy decorations for Emopal in “Store”. The point system encourages people to keep on training their EQ.
Heuristic evaluation
Our team applies the Heuristic evaluation as a fast check of our design. Heuristic evaluation is the first step when accessing usability, proposed by Jakob Nielsen, consists of 10 basic rules. The method is fast and effective, without needing any user to be involved.
10 rules of Heuristic evaluation
1. Visibility of system status
2. Match between system and the real world
3. User control and freedom
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation
Usability test
Wizard of oz design method
To decide the best facial expression and motion of the Emopal robot, our team use the wizard of oz design method. We use the phone to represent the robot’s face and show it to our users, the user’s feedback helps us improve the details.
Low-fi prototype
During the low-fi prototype status, we execute AB test. We ask the users to complete certain missions while observing and recording, and then interview the user for some “why” question. With the AB test, we can narrow down the concept.
High-fi prototype and usability testing
In the usability test, we involve 20 people and divide them into four groups, so there are five people in each group to test the same feature. According to Neilsen Norman, 80% of the problems can be found within 5 users. During the test, we define four key missions to be tested, as the following shows.
- posting a mood diary
- checking a friend’s mood and send a message to him/her
- checking the mood statistic for this month.
- Buying a specific item in the store.
We record the time they spent to complete the missions, and at the same time recording the screen to analyze which specific step should be improved.
As the graphic shows, after four rounds, the time spent to complete all four missions had reduced significantly. This means the new user can easier learn to use this App. Moreover, the post-test questionnaire also pointed out that users are more satisfied with the improved version.
Exhibition
Yen Lin Huang
Product manager
UX researcher
C. R. Lin
Industrial Designer
S. J. Wen
Business Developer
W. Lee
UX designer
Video maker