Year
2020
Category
New Talent
Country
Sweden
School
Umeå Institute of Design
Teacher
Thomas Degn, Stoffel Kuenen
Three questions to the project team
What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
The core challenge of the project was the sensitive topic itself. After all, panic attacks and general mental health are topics that are very personal and can be emotionally challenging for people to talk about. To be fully immersed in the project, we focused on a user-centric approach throughout the entire product development process. Through user interviews the participants shared their very personal experiences and different ways to ground themselves during a panic attack. From the findings, the challenge arose to design different stimuli into an inclusive solution that is valuable for the individual user.
What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
Our personal highlight was working together in an interdisciplinary team and ending up with a great solution in such a short amount of time. Another great highlight and aha! moment was learning, through user studies, that there was no general preference for a combination of stimuli. During the testing, with quick UX mockups, we saw that several of the probes did not respond as we had conceptualized. The aha! moment came when the users started combining the different stimuli themselves and explaining to us how they could assist them best.
Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
The project was a catalyzer for us as designers to tackle problems that are imperceptible to create valuable, inclusive, and inspiring solutions for users as well as the industry. We are proud of the result and potential in the project, largely since it is based on such valuable research and knowledge shared by the users. The future of the project is still undefined but we definitely reached an outcome that creates food for thought. We see our team in the next 5 years working in the design field and still solving such delicate problems in the best possible ways.
