User Experience of Universal School-Based e-Mental Health Solutions

Abstract

Due to lack of in-person social interactions and stressful conditions resulting from schools’ closures, major lockdowns, and other restrictions imposed for preventing the further spread of COVID-19, there has been a great concern regarding adolescents’ mental well-being and their access to mental health resources. Now, e-mental health resources that schools can develop and offer to all their students could play a much more important role: as a valuable, accessible, and affordable means for educating and empowering adolescents to maintain a balanced mental and emotional well-being. In this paper, we aim to explore the expectations and desires of adolescent students from the user experience of universally delivered school-based e-mental health solutions. Through conducting qualitative exploratory interviews with adolescent students and performing contextual analysis, we have identified the core needs, expectations and desires that were shared between high school students pertaining to e-mental health resources. By reporting our findings via diagrams and tables, we offer HCI/UX designers and developers a means to help them create a better strategy for their universal e-mental health solutions and put a more focused effort into addressing the core needs, expectations, and desires of adolescent students from said solutions: first, by providing them the solutions’ must-haves (the identified user expectations from the UX of e-mental health solutions), and then, by targeting to include the solutions’ nice-to-haves (the identified factors that can make the experience of e-mental health solutions more desirable for the students).