Smiling Smind
Helping Smiling Mind Develop a Tool to Measure and Aid Wellbeing in Schools
We partnered with Smiling Mind, a mental health organisation, to explore how schools can measure the impact of wellbeing initiatives. We aimed to understand their needs and challenges, ultimately validating the creation of a Smiling Mind assessment tool.
To achieve this, we conducted one-on-one interviews and facilitated collaborative co-design workshops with diverse school personnel. These sessions provided valuable insights that informed the development of a user-centered assessment tool (MVP) for schools. This MVP will allow schools to track the effectiveness of their well being programs, directly supporting Smiling Mind's mission of fostering mental well-being in educational environments.
My Role
Service Designer
Client
Smiling Mind
Agency
Isobar
Key Collaborators
Steph Ransom - Service Design
Design Challenge
How might we design a system that empowers educators to continuously improve and adapt their well-being practices, enabling them to better meet the evolving needs of their students?
Research Approach
Behavioural Personas
To gain a nuanced understanding of educator preferences for wellbeing and assessment, we created educator behavioral personas. These personas complement existing Smiling Mind personas. Built on our research, these personas capture key insights about educator approaches. We started with customer journey maps to identify educator needs, challenges, and opportunities for improvement. We then expanded the personas to include additional valuable insights that will guide the design of solutions for educators.
Eco-system Map
Based on our interviews and desktop research, we developed a draft ecosystem map. This map helped us understand where the different players within the education system fit and what resources and support they were providing to educators regarding well-being and personal/ social capabilities.
This mapping included understanding the assessment for well-being landscape better and identified some inspiration for how assessment could be done in an effective way.
Co-design
In order to strengthen our initial understanding, we employed a co-design approach alongside the brainstorming phase. This collaborative process ensured the ideas we generated were well-grounded and had a high potential to benefit educators. It also helped us ensure the solutions we developed aligned with Smiling Mind's goals and capabilities.
Concepts
We started with a wealth of ideas and used a two-step process to refine them into four strong concepts. First, storyboards visualised user interaction with these concepts in their everyday environments. Concept canvases then helped us explore different ways people could engage with them, along with potential simplifications or expansions. Importantly, these explorations were directly linked to user needs and research findings, ensuring each concept addressed a specific challenge. Finally, drawing on insights from co-design sessions, we filtered a wider pool of options based on their feasibility for school implementation, potential impact, and alignment with Smiling Mind's business goals. This filtering process, along with identified focus areas, ultimately shaped our final four refined concepts.
Outcome
The co-design ideation sessions yielded four well-developed concepts, presented as concept canvases.
These canvases showcased alternative interactions and uses for each concept, along with potential simplifications and extensions. This exercise empowered Smiling Mind to make strategic decisions about supporting and enabling the tracking and measurement of well-being in educational settings.
