Introduction

For this year's Design Sprint in ECON 325: Principles and Practice class we were thrilled to have the opportunity to partner with the non-profit organization Helping Give Away Psychological Science or HGAPS for short. HGAPS focuses on providing psychological science to those in need for free to promote well-being in the community and help others learn about mental health. Founded in 2016 by Dr. Youngstrom and Dr. Ong at UNC-Chapel Hill started HGAPS as a student organization, but have managed to grow it and are looking to help people worldwide have access to psychological science.

Our goal coming into the Design Sprint was to help HGAPS build their brand on YouTube. We wanted people to have access to videos describing what HGAPS has to offer and tutorials on how to access the information HGAPS provides. Additionally, we want to continue releasing videos of meetings involving HGAPS, so the public can stay up to date with current initiatives and future plans. We want their YouTube channel to take advantage of the algorithm and share videos with everyday users and have a platform that they can point their own users to when they need help or have questions.

Survey Responses

In order to get the most accurate survey responses possible, we had to first identify our target audience. HGAPS mainly targets students and other young adults looking to access psychological information. We also had to understand that it was likely that both current and new users would access the YouTube channel. With this information we asked college aged users what their preferences were when they watched YouTube and what information they would potentially access through HGAPS.

Question - How Long of a Video Would You Watch on YouTube?

Question - What Kind of Content do you Watch?

Question - What Content Would you Watch on the HGAPS Channel?

Question - How Easy is it to Navigate the HGAPS Channel?

Background Information

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How Might We

Interviews

After initial surveys, we gained a better understanding of who our clients were and who their target audience was. From this information, we produced and conducted remote interviews to further develop our redesign. We were able to reach out to psychology students and professors to get their input on what they expected from a YouTube channel like HGAPS.

Prototype Iterations

Prototype 1

Final Prototype

Conclusion

During the process of making our first prototype we discovered many areas to make adjustments to. For example, we added a banner, inbedded social media links, thumbnails, and an introduction to each video with music and the HGAPS logo. Further, we included playlists on the YouTube page in order to help organize the videos. Lastly, we thought including a pinned video that answers the question “what is HGAPS” would be beneficial to users. After making these big changes the following prototypes just included adding more videos and new thumbails!

Key Benefits

Following Up

After speaking with several different users about our Final Prototype we wanted to share some of their takeaways from the improvements we had made. Overall, our improvements were well received and people enjoyed the more visually appealing page as compared to the current one. Some more specific points include:

• Increase in ease of navigation
• Increase in visual appeal
• Gave a more professional impression
• Interviewees understood what HGAPS was much more after the final prototype presentation.

We hope to use this follow up feedback to keep what is important to the users in mind in case our ideas our implemented. With launching any product, the user or consumer is the most important part of the process because without them our efforts would fail.

Spreading the Message