When going through the trials and tribulations of being a college student life can become stressful. Most people in college don't just have their courses to worry about they have jobs, family, and a social life. For my senior project, I will create an app (Unoia) that will work with college counseling services to provide students with a safe, judge-free environment to seek help. Unoia incorporates a seamless way for appointments with counselors that can be scheduled and monitored, as well as video-guided exercises that will allow a person to work on themselves while they build up their future.
With the growing world of apps expanding, the app store seems to be full of self-help applications. Unoia will allow students to be handed this app through a secure school counselor. The main clients for Unoia are different schools and institutions looking for a solution to their counseling services scheduling problems. Unoia will allow Counseling Services to track a student's growth closely and easily aid them along the way.
The target audience for this is college-aged students from 18-24 with educationdata.org saying “12.8 million, or 42.1% of American 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college or graduate school.”(Hanson and Checked). Knowing this information and talking with Pennsylvania School of Technology Counseling Services, who currently use 3 different applications to schedule, retain, and maintain student health around campus I saw a target audience who is looking for a private app that feels safe, organizes, and helps schedule a student.
Unoia has its beginnings in college itself. Created by a student after seeing the multiple programs their college Counseling services were using, these include scheduling, out-of-meeting improvement, and a day-to-day routine. The main concept behind the creation of Unoia was to provide a discrete application that any student can get. This app would then allow a place where the student can improve all aspects of their mental health, Features included in the app include a custom calendar, personally assigned sessions from a counselor, a customizable routine, and a weekly checking to allow closer observation of the student by the councilor.
Unoia is all about the student-counselor relationship. Counseling.ufl.edu says that “Counseling is about giving you support to help you reach your own conclusions and act for yourself. Counselors can offer encouragement, but they cannot make your choices or changes for you.” The goal of Unoia is to add another level of help for students to make those positive changes outside of the in-person session. Once Unoia is used to its full capability and range it will allow a person to live happier, healthier, and be well-minded.
Unoia’s target audience is college-aged students aged 18-24, this group comes from research done for the project. This comes from educationdata.org which says “12.8 million, or 42.1% of American 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college or graduate school.”(Hanson and Checked). Using this information I wanted to hone in on a specific group of people, so that way Unoia would function best so I had a sit-down meeting with the Pennsylvania School of Technology Counseling Services. They are currently using 3 different applications to schedule, retain, and maintain student health around campus. Finally, I conducted a survey using Maze.com to get real data and answers from students. From all this information I saw a target audience who is looking for a private app that feels safe, organizes, and helps schedule a student.
For the research of Unoia, my goal was to refine and find a solution on how to structure, prioritize, and design a mental health app. To complete these goals through the research I used multiple sources including counseling services and surveys. I started first with counseling services, I had a meeting with Linda Locher and discussed what they use and enjoy from apps they currently use like TAO. From this, I was able to take away “sessions” as a key part of what the counseling services wanted to see. As well as an organized planner for students to keep track of meetings with counselors.
For my second form of research, I was able to gather my data by setting up a survey on Maze.com. The results add to the question of how many students would use a mental health app and what they would find most valuable in an app. Using the information from these main forms of research I was able to refine my model for a target audience.
Prosses for Unoia Started with the basic research on what my client wanted and how I would deliver the product. After knowing this I started with the logo and name, I know I wanted something discrete to add to the comfort of someone using the app but also something that felt sophisticated and belonged in a college. For This, I settled on the name Unoia coming from the Greek word Eunoia and removing the E for ease of recognition and to emphasize the app is focused on you.
For the app, I wanted something modern, and minimal so the user was able to get to what they needed quickly and understand the layout of the application. To achieve this I went for a main scroll which allows access to the individual features and displays a thumbnail of what the features are and do. I also wanted to choose a color palette that matched this idea deciding on a monochromatic palette using blues and purples.
The mock-ups I chose to display here are only screenshots and I encourage you to click the links below to get the full effect of both the landing page and the mobile app.