Designing accessible coping mechanism for seafarers

Sailing for couple months with continuously work, seafarers faced challenges related to mental wellness, including high stress levels, uncertainty and insecurity, and duration at sea. With number of seafarers 'tragedy' increase time by time, it's difficult to maintain the seafarers especially mental health. One of our challenge to develop this was to create an intuitive and easy wellness app that showed all necessary part because most of the seaferars is non tech-savvy person.

About the project

Learning about the contexts where seafarers are perceive about mental health

Present journey as point of entrance

Direct support and indirect support is more and more where the official support is way too far to reach. They choose to ignore the early affection of depression, because theres not much support and information they get about the mental health issue. They choose to deal with the situation to be able to adjust with the environment because they facing lack of direct and indirect support. In this case, direct support is support that they can ask directly, like their smartphone who give joy to ignore the issue, or taking notes about current job or taking nice pics as memory. Indirect support can be their friend or supervisor by discuss about the the working progress or another issue, or shore information about mental health.

However, there is direct support in mobile form which limits health assistance. Working with mobile apps is an important part of sending submission or whistleblow form to shore teams, and aligning their team on goals feels impossible to do on another app like MCA Guidance, Crew Matter, and ISWAN for seafarers.

1. A lack of self-expression

Support is the main reason why seafarers use wellness app. Support can have various meanings, it can be direct support, indirect support or shore support, self-support, or even friend/colleague support. User can't get in a action to express the journey after reading the document about mental health.

1. A lock of documentation

The intention is there to distracting the user via bunch of video of exercising or doing workout, but the absence of documenting the process make user lose context of crew matter.

1. A lack of repetitive activities

Latest information on wellness can be attractiveness. Using it to read more about the crucial information is fine, but what next step? reading without taking action to implement the information is like learning football but not participating on the game.

Cross-disciplinary ideation session

I ran an remote ideation session based on my research-results with the help of a design team to create first conceptual solutions. Being remote, it was harder to start with group-thinking, so we started out brainstorming different solutions on our own, combining the ideas of the group later on and building onto these ideas together using Miro.

Solutions went from having habit creation and using a mobile device, to build a sort of layer-system from habit stack creation. Capture moment to take photo and seeing the timeline in a sort of preview window we all used back in the instagram days, and journaling as memory recognize in previous/current event.

Creating Design Guidelines to make decision-making easier

Once we had a solid direction for the design, my and my team began to produce multiple different variations of wireframes. I then put the designs in front of users and internal stakeholders for testing and feedback. This helped me to narrow the design down to two major variations, which I used to establish a single design framework, and thus move into visual design.

Prototyping mental models of possible solutions

Based on the results of the concepting session previously, I worked on several high-level prototypes using simple elements and wrote short write-ups of the solutions to think them through. By making the prototypes interactive, how simple they still were, I could deliver quick and simple usability testing to the user.

The directions included a basic version of onboarding selection, create new habit and set alarm, write journal and capture moment:

Testing the explorations

To learn to what extent these directions could solve the problem, I went over the prototypes with 8 users using Zoom/Google meet. Testing was conducted with crew and users that previously join the user interview plus some user that had never interacted with us before.

Iteratively prototyping and testing the core components to explore and understand solutions

Based on the test results, I iterated on the multiple design concept. This brought up a set of interesting problems with the flow itself, from display on homepage to each stage of creation.

I iteratively the UI and tried to tackle all the problems, starting from the core of the application, working inside out. In various iterations, I translated point on onboarding (using slide to measure the point) to option on onboarding (using single click), figured out how straightforward-creation and multiple-directions within the app, and built up a suggestion to simplify the workflow, iteration after iteration.

The result: a wellness app that helps seafarers to create habit, capture moment, and journaling.

Based on extensive research and user-tests, my prototype solved the most problem stated at the beginning of the project. It can be the new tool to overcome their 'early-stage' of mental health issue, whether it's still a first move or a thought-through plan, the combination of theory (a set of wellness supporting document) and practice (habit creation, capture moment, daily journal) gave unique stimulus, whether they're envisioning what the right concept is or carefully shaping how they're going to creatively build the habit.

Because of the ease of use, the habit creation that show suggestion title for simply creation, and set tools for alarm to remind the event, seafarers can feel confident to create habit that fit their interest. And just as habit creation, journaling also help them to express their feeling of past or current event, or simply take photo of what they think its memorable, and maybe even the start of big change in their situation.

Land a smooth design handover

Working as team member means take care of personal task but also considering of streamline the project by give hint on the design process for the engineer team because it will help them on the deployment process after design handover. By initiatively creating design documentation, means give extra space for my team to working on the next process.

P.S: Figma just launched new feature in Dev Mode. one of the feature is annotations. excited about this feature, which mean i can do automatically in figma. no longer needed for manual work.

Wrapping up

Outcome of this project

As this module live on early of Jan 2024, we not yet have the analytic on how the seafarers use it. Considering the start line of this is to help seafarers to overcome depression, mental health, anxiety. We commit to do the repeated iteration to make sure our app can fit the user idea.

Process

Dividing the seafarers interaction into various stages for habit stack, journaling and capture moment and having wellness reference granted some clarity to a previously confusing process. However, the short development time and limited user testing means there may be some lingering user problems that still need to be flushed out.

Lesson learned

• To understand the problem is most important part of solving it.

• To present multiple solutions, explain their benefits and disadvantage and explain which I felt best solved the problem.

• Design process from start until design handover is a team work although has individual contribution in it. Besides for the extensive contributions of my PM, it’s a collaborative effort with all stakeholders possible, from client through engineers.