Mental health & Isolation during COVID
Article written by Dila Ozer , Amélie Perdriaud and Lidija Krcmar.
How you respond to stress during the COVID-19 pandemic can depend on your background, your social support from family or friends, your financial situation, your health and emotional background, the community you live in, and many other factors. Fear and anxiety about a new disease and what could happen can be overwhelming and cause strong emotions in adults and children. Public health actions, such as social distancing, can make people feel isolated and lonely and can increase stress and anxiety. However, these actions are necessary to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Coping with stress in a healthy way will make you, the people you care about, and your community stronger.
Empathize
What is the most important thing to do to manage Mental Health well? And Why?
Mental health issues today have almost become pandemic. What a nice verbal irony: covid 19 pandemic.
The new realities of working from home, temporary unemployment, home-schooling of children, and lack of physical contact with other family members, friends, and colleagues take time to get used to. Adapting to lifestyle changes such as these, and managing the fear of contracting the virus, and worrying about people close to us who are particularly vulnerable, are challenging for all of us. They can be particularly difficult for people with mental health conditions.
Fortunately, there are lots of things that we can do to look after our own mental health and to help others who may need some extra support and care. The COVID-19 pandemic has created significant stress and anxiety for many parents around the world. Psychological
flexibility and self-care are key aspects of psychological health. For parents, their priority should be to shape these processes. Therefore, the target audience of the research is parents.
We have created some survey questions like these :
- Do you mind being alone? ..overwhelmed this situation?
- Are you feeling tired?
- Are you getting annoyed and irritable?
- Do you get any help from someone during a lockdown?
- Does your partner help you? (are you satisfied?) etc.
On the other hand, we learned from our interviews that parents were tired more than normal during the period and that working at home, taking care of children, and doing housework at the same time forced them physically but more mentally.
As a result of the surveys and interviews, we realized that people were not able to organize their daily lives efficiently and this situation negatively affected their psychology. During a second study: we read in articles published in places such as WHO, UNICEF, Forbes: that the psychology of parents is more affected than people living single or without children.
Interviews showed us:
The biggest problem is that there was not enough time for their children and themselves.
So they were worried about their children’s situation for example they had more time in front of the screens (TV, iPad, etc). Some children felt alone themselves. Also, parents were worried because it was difficult to organize children’s day (activities, lessons, classes, etc)
And they mentioned that it was hard to concentrate on their work while constantly thinking about kids. And of course, managing their relationship and communication with their partner.
And what could they do for themselves at the end of this whole run?
Things that used to seem trivial, but now they are valuable like gold:
drinking coffee with a friend, staying alone with ownself, or just watching a favorite movie or reading some book or nothing.
Define
After all the research we have done we had to synthesize the information so we could figure out what the main problem is. We used several techniques for doing so.
Affinity map
First, we made an affinity map from the interview results. We soon came to the conclusion that there are a few general categories that we can divide, like: parents’ feelings, children’s feelings, screen time during the lockdown, how parents deal with the school during that time, change in a financial situation, and the future.
Empathy map
In the next step we define who we are empathizing with. We did it with the help of an empathy map canvas. Some of the conclusions that we made during this phase are following:
What parents say during the lockdown is: “I feel overwhelmed and I have no time for myself.”
What parents see during the lockdown is: “My kids don’t understand the difference between home and school.”
What parents think during the lockdown is: “I am overwhelmed by work and school activities.”
What are parents’ pain points during the lockdown is: “I am interrupted all day long by my kids. I have to work late to finish my work tasks.”
What parents do during the lockdown is: “I work and help my kids with school at the same time.”
What parents hear during the lockdown is:” Other parents seem to handle the situation better than I do.”
What parents feel during the lockdown is:” I am not sure I am a good mother for my children.”
What parents like to see during the lockdown is:” I would like to be better organized for the next lockdown.”
Problem statements
These are some quotes from parents about the home situation during the lockdown. Further, we went and synthesized the problem statement. We came to the conclusion that the main problem parents have during the lockdown is following:
“Parents during the lockdown need to find a way to have more personal time per day because they feel very tired both physically and mentally.”
How might we
With the How Might We statements we tried to solve their problem. We came to the following conclusion:
“We believe helping manage time for parents during lockdown will achieve their goal of feeling less tired both physically and mentally.”
“We will know we are right when they will have at least half an hour of personal time during the day.”
User persona
To make these parents more really we created a user persona Christina Van Der Laan!
User journey
To help us see where Christina has problems during the day we a user journey so we can visualize her day beret and figure out the exact time where she needs help the most.
As seen from the user journey, Christina has almost no personal time, Her work is scattered during the whole day and there are no consistent working hours, and the school guidance that she has to give to her kids is almost nonexistent as well. Kids barely get anything done for school during the day.
We concluded that Christina has a problem the whole day managing her work and school of the children. Her problem wouldn’t go away if we give her one or two hours. We needed to come up with a plan to give Christina a whole day of kids free.
Ideate
Storyboard
To have a better understanding of the user journey of Christina, we’ve created some storyboards to explain her day, before and after a potential solution.
Brainstorm
We then focused on our problem statement :
“Parents during the lockdown need to find a way to have more personal time per day because they feel very tired both physically and mentally.”
We started our ideation phase by generating a lot of ideas. We put everything on post-its and then created a mind map out of it.
Here are some of the ideas we had :
- Display alerts at the beginning and the end of the working/school day
- Provide planning of the day to children (activities, moments where parents cannot be disturbed, beginning and end of the day, break time)
- Help parents finding activities for their children (search with filters)
- Plan Visio with extended family so the parent will have free time while children are speaking to other people
- Check parents and children mental health daily to anticipate any domestic violence
But we chose to work on an idea that was way more disruptive than those ones: a system that would help parents find other parents from the same school who could take care of their children for one day.
Features prioritization
We brainstormed again to generate ideas, and we ended up with a list of features we wanted to do, prioritized with the MOSCOW method.
The system will be managed by the school: a token will be sent to parents by mail for their children. This way they will be able to create an account and join the school group of their kid.
Then they will be able to see on a monthly calendar who is available to host kids, with the number of kids they will be able to host. They will also be able to declare themselves as available to host kids. They can then pick a parent and ask him or her to host their child for one day.
The system will work with a token: if you host one kid for one day, then you can find a host for your kid for one day.
Here is the list of our prioritized ideas:
Concept testing
Of course, considering the COVID crisis, hygiene and security are things that we have to consider. But at the same time, the lockdown in the Netherlands was not as strict as it was in other countries. Plus, we made the assumption that the consequences on the mental health of parents and children (social anxiety, impact on the development, domestic violence…) will be considered as more important for parents than the risks of being infected by the coronavirus.
To validate our idea, we run a concept testing on a few parents living in the Netherlands. We introduced our idea in a few words and asked them if they will be willing to use this service.
Surprisingly, this idea was warmly welcomed by the parents. The majority of them were enthusiastic about it.
Prototype and test
Low-fi prototype
So we generated some ideas on paper and created collectively our first paper prototype: https://www.figma.com/proto/vRzm7Kt8qzMDHLRQdvsf09/Swapkips-Low-fi?node-id=1%3A2&scaling=scale-down
Mid-fi prototype
We tested this prototype on a couple of parents and received a lot of remarks that helped us refine the prototype and create our mid-fi prototype.
https://www.figma.com/proto/muJGKrfSFrJ0SAy6fkWTnP/Swapkids-Mid-fi?node-id=1%3A3&scaling=min-zoom
We tested again this mid-fi prototype and receive a lot of good feedbacks:
- Have a more consistent UI regarding the host system (find a host or be a host)
- Add “including yours” for the number of kids so it can be more clear how many children will be in the house at the end
- Add an icon of children to describe the number of kids instead of simple dots
- Have the possibility to handle several of your children in the app
- Explain better the token system (needs to be clear and fair)
- Have more consistent back buttons
Conclusion
This project was way more challenging than the previous one, as we added a lot of new concepts:
- Brainstorming methods
- Mind mapping
- User journey
- Storyboard
- Concept testing
- Mid-fi prototype
Again, it was really interesting to learn by doing.
We’ve also learned a lot from our mistakes. Among other things, your design choices should always be justified by data and not intuition.
