OCD relief cube

Experience Design I

Student

September 2020 - December 2020

Adobe Indesign, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, SketchUp

project criteria

Apply the methods, and resources, and reflect on the themes of Researching & Understanding Experience, Mapping & Articulating Insights, Identifying & Prioritizing Opportunities, Designing & Evaluating Solution Concepts to research the problem space, articulate your insights in some form of visual artifacts, identify opportunities, and select one to design and evaluate.

project overview

In order to best portray the user-centered design process, I chose a topic that derived from my passion of incorporating design with psychology, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. My goal for the project was to utilize both primary and secondary research to determine an opportunity space within the chosen problem that would benefit those suffering from OCD symptoms.

background research

I first began with thoroughly studying the topic of OCD and specifically what causes OCD, how the disorder affects the brain, the articulation between Compulsions and Obsessions, and the many subtypes of OCD that have been seen. This research helped set me up to better understand the pain points and needs seen in my user research, and to gain more knowledge on OCD to better align my design decisions.

user research

After gaining a better understanding of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I then moved into the design phase of better understanding my user's needs through qualitative User Research. Because of the climate of today's society, I had to find a way to connect with OCD sufferers in a digital way. I decided to utilize the social media platform of Facebook and ask those in Facebook Groups specifically meant for OCD support to answer a questionnaire that I designed. Within my questionnaire, I asked the following questions:

What type of OCD are you diagnosed with?

What are your typical compulsions?

Do you have frequent unwanted thoughts that seem uncontrollable?

Do you have rituals or repetitive behaviors that take a lot of time in a day?

How has OCD affected your life? Positively or negatively?

How do you best deal with your compulsive tendencies?

On a scale from tactical (doing, hands on, or touching) to mental (meditation, focusing on something else, distraction) what works best for you to relieve your symptoms?

Have you had any products or services (non-medical/not medication) that have helped you maneuver through OCD?

If you could wish for a product/service/app to help with your/their symptoms related to OCD, what would you find helpful?

After compiling the answers sent into my questionnaire, I set out to articulate my data in different types of user research visualizations.

opportunity identification

After all of my research, I compiled the data to create a bar graph displaying how my researched users best get relief from their OCD symptoms. From this graph, as well as my affinity diagram groupings, and persona empathy map, I created several opportunities for design.

The main question I set out to answer with my design was,

"How might we non-medically reduce the effect of OCD symptoms on the daily lives of those diagnosed?"

solution concept ideation

I brainstormed ideas that could satisfy my “how might we” statement and organized them into the categories of technology, services, objects, and miscellaneous.

The concepts that I decided to choose to take to prototyping were based on the idea of satisfying the needs of both users who prefer tactical relief as well as mental relief. The goal is to design as universal as possible for those diagnosed with any subtype OCD.

prototyping

For prototyping, I designed a “relief cube” with interactive features to satisfy compulsion and distraction needs. The relief cube also connects to an associated mobile application, in which it tracks the time, date, and location of each time the user uses a specific side of the cube. This will be placed into a log to help the user understand what their triggers are, and what compulsions are most common for them.

The 4” relief cube is portable, easily accessible, and aims to provide all types of compulsion needs on one object. This will help users reduce the amount of time completing compulsions, help them finish their compulsion rituals quickly and efficiently, provide distraction away from unwanted intrusive thoughts, and help them get back to focusing on their daily life activities faster. It also provides automatic logging of compulsions which allows users to better understand what causes their obsessions and compulsions, and potentially help them overcome the frustrations of the symptoms of OCD in a non-medical way.

This relief cube will provide symptom relief for those struggling with both tactical and mental compulsions because of its multi-functional components. It allows the brain to utilize sound, color, and touch.

conclusion

From this project, I learned the true importance of research and user research within the design process. I continued to refer back to my data throughout the entire process, and it constantly informed the design decisions that I made. In addition, creating visualizations for the data that I obtained from research allowed me to more clearly understand the scope that my design needed to follow.

Another important thing that I gained from this project is that no matter what subject or topic you are designing for, your potential users will all be different. It is difficult to find a solution that would universally solve each of your users’ needs. It requires a large amount of prior research and brainstorming. Where I had the most difficulty is finding a way to design for both tactical forms of OCD as well as mental forms of OCD. Because the symptoms and compulsions are so different, it was difficult to find a happy medium between the two. However, I wanted to make sure that I did accomplish this because according to my user research, many people have multiple types of OCD and have symptoms from both ends of the spectrum.

The next steps that I would like to take for this project, is to present the prototype to users and conduct user testing to understand the potential flaws of my design. It would be valuable to track the user engagement over a month, to understand why or why not the user utilized my design. I would then proceed to take my insights, return back to my research, and conduct the entire design process again until I have reached a design that best fits my users’ needs and truly does reduce the effect of OCD symptoms on their daily lives.