RESeT (Relaxation Environment for Stress in Teens)
Research, design, and development of a virtual reality application for adolescent mental health
Overview
Teens suffer from high levels of stress and depression that can impact their mental and physical health, with much of this stress coming from school and academics. The Project RESeT group is working to design self-administered virtual reality (VR) aimed to reduce teen stress.
This project involves ongoing agile research, development, and testing cycles, and we are currently preparing our VR application for a large-scale usability test in April 2021.
Context
Project Background
Project RESeT is an ongoing project that started in 2019, using participatory design with teens to identify design requirements and brainstorm components of a self-administered virtual reality application to reduce stress.
In spring 2020 we quickly pivoted from an in-person to remote study for feasibility and evaluation of a 3rd party VR environment. In fall 2020 we began development of our own VR application from scratch.
We are currently using agile development to ready our environment for a 30-person home-study with teens.
My Role
I joined Project RESeT in spring 2020 as part of the 4-person research team, and then expanded into a UX design and development role. Currently I am part of a 2-person research team leading usability studies of our most recent iterations, and working on the 4-person development team, turning research insights into new designs. I created the majority of our base VR environment and am currently collaborating on user interaction components.
Project Process
- Feasibility Study
- Interviews
- Design Requirements
- User Flow
- Sketching & Storyboarding
- Prototyping
- Digital Environment
- Interactions
- Usability Testing
- Thematic Analysis
- Fixes & Updates
- Further Iterations
Discover
Feasibility Study
We conducted feasibility studies with 31 adolescents ages 14-20 years to explore the self-administration of a 3rd party VR application that met many of our design requirements. Over two-weeks participants used the application at home while reporting their daily stress and mood levels, and then participated in a post-study interview.
The goals were to validate previously generated design requirements, and learn what teens thought about the environment and how they used it, in order to inform the design of our own VR app.
This approach allowed us to efficiently gather meaningful and rich target user feedback and validate our design requirements without having to make our own application first.
Pandemic Pivot
One of three planned home studies had been conducted when the pandemic hit, requiring a pivot in the study approach and materials to ensure participant and researcher safety.
My Contributions
I created participant communication materials, updated our instruction manual for a remote study, created a researcher checklist to track our workflow, coordinated headset delivery and pickup, conducted interviews with 6 (out of 21) participants, and performed thematic analysis of qualitative data.
Researcher workflow and participant tracking:
Plan
Main Design Requirements
In nature, winter scene, with animals
Open-world with no barriers, no instructions
Choice of short interactions, between 3-5 min each
Nature sounds and ambient music
Design requirements were created by combining insights from prior codesign sessions with new insights from the home studies.
Sketches & Storyboard
I visualized our base environment and set locations for interactions to take place. Using natural features I created player boundaries that would restrict player movement while maintaining an open-world feel.
These sketches were used in meetings to decide how to move forward as a group and sparked brainstorming of additional ideas.
I created storyboards of various user interactions for discussion with the full dev team.
Bird Search
Variations of Onboarding Interactions
Build
Our application consists of a relaxing environment and interactions that the user can perform. I created the base environment and brainstormed and prototyped various interactions.
Environment
Prior codesign sessions determined the virtual setting of our application: a winter forest with mountains, water, and trees. I utilized water and mountains to create natural borders and added paths to guide the player to interaction spaces.
I shared the environment with the full development team and we worked together to add additional features and interactions. We brainstormed ways to make the environment feel even more immersive and realistic while still running efficiently, which is a challenge with standalone VR headset development. My favorite addition was falling snow, which was suggested and added by one of my teammates.
Interactions
Each member of the team prototyped an interaction in a separate scene, and then added them to the main project scene once they were complete. Here is an example of one of the interactions I worked on in the prototype phase and then added to the main scene:
Bird Search Prototype
Bird Search Iteration
Using separate scenes for prototyping and working out bugs allowed us to collaborate remotely in an efficient way and avoid merge conflicts when updating the main project.
Review
We are currently usability testing the RESeT Environment and generating insights from participant feedback. I am working as part of a 2-person team leading the usability studies and analysis, and turning research insights into design recommendations.
Analysis is still ongoing, but here is a bit of memorable feedback:
Maybe I'll just carry this around with me and carry happiness with me...so I just carried the rock the entire time.
Next Steps
Using an agile process we will conduct 2 more usability and development cycles. Prior to deploying our application for the planned desirability and feasibility study later this spring, we will conduct a cognitive walkthrough of the environment.