Building a supportive community for students through personalized mental health resources and conversational tools.
Conversational AI
Mental Health
Innovative Educational Tool
Mobile App
Organization
Tsinghua University
Role
UX Designer
Team
1 Psychologist, 1 Developer,
& 1 Designer
Duration
16 weeks
Tsinghua University, renowned as one of the most prestigious and competitive institutions in China, also faces the highest reported rates of student depression and anxiety nationwide.
The current support system creates barriers for both students and supporters—students struggle to access the right help, while supporters lack guidance to provide effective support, leading to ineffective connections.
Support-seekers need accessible and effective help, while supporters seek to provide timely, personalized, and meaningful support—bridging these needs is key to a successful system.
The core need is fostering accessible and meaningful connections that empower both seekers and supporters.
Personalized support aligned with individual preferences improves mental well-being, emphasizing the importance of matching the right support style.
The platform balances accessibility and autonomy, ensuring a seamless experience while empowering both seekers and supporters.
Insights from research revealed a gap—seekers need personalized support, and supporters need intuitive guidance. This led us to design a platform that bridges both needs seamlessly.
Aligning user insights with design solutions to deliver timely, personalized, and accessible mental health support.
Supporters define their style using descriptive tags, which are then displayed for students to choose from, streamlining the matching process for more intuitive and effective connections.
A comparison of different interaction methods highlights character-based support selection as the most engaging and effective approach, combining personalization with ease of use.
Students quickly select a character and start chatting, while supporters set up their character profiles, customizing their tags and preferences before receiving chat invitations.
A mobile app ensures accessibility and anonymity, offering on-the-go support and a personalized experience for seamless mental health engagement.
Refining wireframes into high-fidelity designs enhances usability, ensuring intuitive navigation and a seamless support experience.
For Supporters
The Support Copilot helps supporters provide compassionate and professional assistance through tailored response suggestions. The “Rewrite” feature improves communication in real-time, while a rating system helps supporters refine their skills and offer more meaningful support.
For Support-seekers
Support seekers can personalize their experience by customizing character attributes like name, age, and hobbies, influencing tone and communication style. This feature enhances comfort and flexibility while encouraging real human connection for deeper support.
Purpose: To evaluate the platform’s usability and emotional impact through qualitative insights from users.
Participants: 60 users total (40 Human-AI, 20 Human-Human).
Key Outcome: Focused on qualitative feedback, highlighting participants’ experiences, emotional responses, and suggestions.
This project underscored the critical need for accessible mental health support among college students, particularly in high-pressure environments like Tsinghua University. By integrating AI as a bridge for effective communication, the solution addresses both emotional learning for support seekers and skill development for supporters. The innovative use of AI not only facilitates connection but also enhances the quality of support provided, highlighting the broader potential of technology in fostering mental well-being.
The team demonstrated strong collaboration, leveraging diverse expertise to align on shared goals. However, time constraints during user testing led to compromises in the interface design, which diverged slightly from the initial vision. Additionally, deploying a web app for testing created minor inconsistencies compared to the intended mobile experience. Despite these challenges, the project successfully delivered a functional prototype that addressed key user needs.
As the sole designer, I navigated the challenge of balancing a warm, approachable aesthetic with a professional tone suited for college students. Communicating design concepts to non-design stakeholders required clear, adaptable presentation skills, further refining my ability to create universally comprehensible solutions. This project reinforced my expertise in user-centered design and cross-disciplinary collaboration while strengthening my adaptability and empathy in the design process.