Project Details:
Type: 5-person Design Research project
My Roles: Senior UX Researcher; Project Manager
Banner Artwork with help from: Ari Daly (senior product designer), Undraw
Methods:
Observation | Semi-Structured Interviews | Diary Studies | Bulls-Eye Diagramming | Affinity Clustering
Storyboarding | Need-Validation via Speed Dating | Surveys | User Testing | RITE Methodology
Storyboarding | Need-Validation via Speed Dating | Surveys | User Testing | RITE Methodology
Tools used: Pen & Paper | Sticky Notes | Whiteboards | Zoom | Google Forms | Mural | Figma
Project Scope:
As part of a project team, I uncovered insights about the modern-day experience of recovering from addiction through an eight-month Capstone Project made possible through collaboration with the Oasis Recovery Center and Biomotivate, and Carnegie Mellon's Master of Human-Computer Interaction program.
LiveLine is a concept for a digital service intended to support people experiencing hurdles in their recovery journeys. My team did extensive research and testing to create a prototype - I led our team's exploratory research efforts and project managed the evaluative research process. Our process and output are shown here.
According to SAMHSA, 1 out of every 7 adults aged 18-25 in the United States had a substance use disorder in 2017 - nearly double the percentage of adults over age 25 - with numbers increasing in 2019 and in 2020 due to COVID. Our final product, LiveLine, made recovery teachings and communities more compatible to a young adult audience with the intention of improving recovery outcomes for that population.
Concept Solution Overview
LiveLine is a video-streaming community platform meant for young adults in recovery. It is intended to be a flexible recovery resource, allowing young adults to carve their own paths recovering from addiction with a lower barrier to entry than traditional resources while also being usable during socially-distant moments due to COVID.
LiveLine borrows from design patterns of popular social media and video platforms
such as Instagram and Twitch to bring a wide range of recovery content to LiveLine users.
Combined with mood tracking and journaling elements, LiveLine is a comprehensive recovery option
with potential for individually-motivated, socially-motivated, public, and anonymous or private recovery pathways.
Research Process
Throughout the spring semester, I conducted domain research to understand people’s experiences with recovery. I aimed to find commonalities in peoples' recovery journey and to uncover opportunities to improve recovery outcomes. After a preliminary literature review to gain a basic understanding of substance use disorder and recovery, I employed research methods including observation, semi-structured interviews, diary studies, bulls-eye diagramming, need-validation via "speed dating", and surveys.
An example of a typical post on Reddit focusing on education-based harm reduction recovery strategies.
A rendering of a Pittsburgh-based treatment and rehabilitation center. Photo from TribLive.com.
Understanding the Domain
As outsiders to the recovery process, my team immersed ourselves in recovery communities in respectful, observatory ways. As a team,
we attended 17 open meetings, one drug court session, and a sober living home as silent observers to better understand the contexts in which people access traditional recovery resources.
we attended 17 open meetings, one drug court session, and a sober living home as silent observers to better understand the contexts in which people access traditional recovery resources.
Additionally, I recommended a method known as "Digital Eavesdropping" to understand how people who did not rely upon peer support groups approached recovery. As a part of this digital observation method, my team read through 200+ posts and comments within 11 substance-related and recovery-related Reddit communities.
Understanding People in Recovery
Knowing "how" people recovered via our observations helped us ask the right questions to understand peoples' "whys" of recovery. We wanted to know why people began using substances, what led them to want to recover, and how they attempted recovery - as well as why different methods worked and didn't work.
To accomplish this, we interviewed five subject matter experts and 26 participants over the course of the project - I facilitated most interviews with research participants, and having a note-taker in session allowed me to jump off-script when my research benefitted from more elaboration - such as asking a young male participant why it took him three years of attending meetings before he felt like he started "recovering".
We conducted some interviews in-person at a local treatment facility, and we facilitated others via phone call or Zoom, with video disabled to preserve our participants' anonymity.
Understanding COVID and Community in Recovery
Our background research and our interviews led us to understand how isolating substance use can be, and how isolation can perpetuate or aggravate a substance use disorder. This realization overlapped with the arrival of COVID-19 in the United States. As a next step, I led a diary study to understand how stay-at-home orders affected peoples' lives while in different stages of their recoveries. I completed the diary study with three participants, totaling 60 entries as well as 12 follow-up interviews.
Conversely to isolation, my research demonstrated that a sense of community helps people find recovery from substance use disorder - it pulls them out of a self-defeating, external-locus-of-control mindset. Yet we knew people left traditional recovery communities like 12-step programs and similar peer support groups out of a sense of dissimilarity between the person's experience and the support group's norms and culture.
To understand this better, we used a bulls-eye diagram, encouraging research participants to rank qualities they wanted the people in their recovery communities to match, such as gender, religious affiliation, time sober, level of anonymity, and substances used.
A First Round of Synthesis
We synthesized notes from interviews conducted with people in recovery or seeking recovery to find commonalities and differences in their experiences. This took the form of Affinity Clustering - a faster form of synthesis that is more flexible and better suited our team's needs than the Affinity Diagram. This allowed each of our team's members to see the same 200 data points and organically sort to make sense out of the interview data.
I photographed my team's work-in-progress affinity clustering exercise from
initial observations, digital eavesdropping, and semi-structured interviews.
Storyboards, Speed Dating, and Surveys
Once I had an understanding of the domain of recovery and potential opportunities for innovation, I conducted evaluative research to stress-test my understanding. To allow ourselves to test our assumptions, my teammates and I each created storyboards. Each storyboard began with a How Might We statement, encouraging participants to consider how the storyboard addressed a need. The storyboards contained four frames - one frame each for context-setting, problem-introduction, solution-introduction, and story-resolution. Additionally, each frame received a caption meant to be read aloud by the research facilitator.
An example of a Speed Dating storyboard with four frames, captions, and a How Might We statement.
I used these storyboards to conduct Speed Dating research sessions. In Speed Dating, participants are encouraged not to consider whether they like or dislike a given storyboard, but rather to explore whether the need or experience shown in the storyboard resonates with them, and why. Storyboards were shown in rapid succession - I sought gut reactions, not detailed analysis, and therefore shared 12-15 storyboards in sessions that were only 45 minutes long. I used Zoom's screen-share feature to conduct these sessions.
My team conducted two rounds of Speed Dating over the course of the project. Because of the density of the data we were collecting in this concept validation stage, we also created a Mixed Methods, light-weight and unmoderated version of Speed Dating using Google Forms to increase the amount of data we were working with in a more time-sensitive manner. We asked participants to write whether the problem illustrated in the storyboard resonated with them, and after seeing storyboards based upon similar needs, they were asked to select which one was the most relatable, exciting, anxiety-inducing, and immediately-usable.
While less rich than our conversational speed dating, its 32 responses supplemented our 22 speed dating sessions over the course of the project, allowing us to more confidently advocate for a design direction.
We asked one to three questions about each storyboard, then grouped the "solution frames"
of each storyboard covering a similar need to ask comparison-based questions.
When sorted by affective reaction and relevance - positive on right, negative on left, neutral up top,
and unrelated below - sense can be made even while zoomed in or zoomed out.
Synthesis Round Two: A Virtual Endeavor
In order to synthesize our Speed Dating sessions remotely, we moved our storyboard images and transcribed our notes in Mural, a digital collaboration tool. I suggested we organized our notes per storyboard, then reorganized them based upon positivity or negativity - positive affect went on the right side of the storyboard, and negative went on the left. I placed neutral statements above, then off-topic ones below.
This allowed my team to, at a glance, see which storyboards developed consistent positive, negative, and mixed reactions that deserved deeper analysis. My team followed suit, and we were able to derive meaning from our work even from a zoomed out, bird's eye view. For this round of synthesis, we had twenty-one clusters like the one shown to the left.
Insights Following the Thread of Research
While our team had a multitude of findings throughout our research that we synthesized into insight over the semester, I settled on two that were most relevant based upon the concepts that were best-validated:
By making resources for recovery more accessible in the moments people are motivated to recovery, we would meet an opportunity to help people recover faster, with fewer moments of relapse. These recovery setbacks currently happen due to reasons such as confusing information online or long wait times to get into treatment.
To be Black and have substances in your environment, or to have a substance use disorder, is a different experience than if you are White - gay people are affected by addiction differently than straight people - and peoples' faith in medicine and religion impact which options they may find most acceptable for attempted recovery. In an ideal world, there would be an equal number of unique, personalized recovery solutions as there are unique people struggling with addiction.
These two insights guided my team and me from the end of our spring research through our iterations and final design of LiveLine by informing the following insight statement:
"Meet people where they are with the right recovery resources at the right time."
My team deliberating over early concepts via dot voting. This would later inform our early-stage prototype probing, Speed Dating (concept validation), and Moments of Truth.
Borrowing from marketing strategy, these moments of truth highlight situations in a person’s recovery
that hold high emotional, mental, and consequential importance, greatly impacting a person’s relationship with recovery.
Is It a Journey, or a Collection of Moments?
Synthesizing the commonalities we found in our research into a single "journey map" felt both disingenuous and detrimental to creating a solution that could meet the variety of addiction and recovery circumstances faced by young adults.
As such, I instead articulated moments of truth in the recovery journey. These are the "make it or break it" moments of recovery - a good experience at any of these moments sets someone up for a successful recovery, and a bad experience could be disastrous. By focusing upon these moments instead of a specific journey, I could better-describe the leverage points for our solution.
I was most interested in two moments of truth: attending your first meeting, citing our client's understanding that "12-step programs will die if they don't get more young adults involved" as well as managing relapses, citing SAMHSA's data illustrating the increase in synthetic opioid-related deaths over the past decade.
From Insight to Guiding Principles
My team's ideas saw 3 rounds of rapid sketching based upon Google Ventures' Design Sprints before settling on the LiveLine concept, and design of the platform prototype went through four levels of fidelity from basic digital sketch to high-fidelity Figma prototype. I broke down our Insight Statement to represent four needs: Relevancy, Community, Clarity, and Immediacy - and these needs served as our guiding principles for design. Each iteration of LiveLine was intended to better and more-clearly support those four needs. I facilitated or took notes for nearly every one of the twenty moderated usability tests we conducted within the three rounds of usability testing we conducted to make LiveLine come to life.
From my undergraduate educational specialization on game design, I was able to advocate for a RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing & Evaluation) approach to our work - if participants consistently overlooked a feature or were dissatisfied by it, I brought feedback to our designers who could make a quick edit for testing with the next participants. Treating usability tests like play-tests of a game allowed us to be more agile in our design process.
LiveLine meets young adults where they are, granting access to a variety of video, peer-support, and self-reflection resources wherever and whenever they are needed.
LiveLine: In-Depth
LiveLine's four major flows are viewing video content, social interaction, journaling/mood tracking, and seeking immediate help. Each of those four flows map to one of the four identified needs, but they are designed to smoothly integrate into each other for a cohesive user experience. My team designed LiveLine to take advantage of design patterns and content-consumption methods that are familiar to young adults, who often find traditional recovery options incompatible with their experiences or circumstances. As I focused largely on conducting exploratory research and usability tests throughout the project, when we reached the prototype-design phase, I assumed a project-management role to ensure research findings were adequately expressed in the design.
Relevant Recovery Video Content: Online, On-Demand
LiveLine supports video-streaming so people can access peer support group meetings, like 12-step programs, or mutual aid groups, like sober painting or hiking groups, while they happen from anywhere in the world. People can find content by tags, comment on live or pre-recorded videos, and take notes to support their own path to recovery. The video format and access to a wide variety of recovery schools of thought keeps recovery relevant for young adults.
An Online Community - just for Recovery
Through direct search, recommendations, or comments on videos, LiveLine users can connect as friends for more direct communication. By becoming friends, you can see each others' public or shared-with-friend activity, such as short mood statuses, shared videos, or journal entries, and you can use LiveLine's direct message system.
Find Clarity in Your Recovery by Journaling and Mood-Tracking
With emojis and a one-page layout, people can easily and quickly input their current mood and a statement for why they feel that way, keeping the entry private, shared with friends, or public. They can then view their mood trends at a monthly, weekly, or daily level to come to a better understanding of their recovery, whether of situational triggers, emotional events, and positive progress.
To compliment the mood-tracking, LiveLine users can also keep a journal. If a blank journal is too much of a burden to fill in, users can add a recovery-focused prompt to make journaling easier. Notes taken during live or pre-recorded videos are saved to the journal as well for easy access.
Find a Variety of Immediate Help Resources in One Place
Recovery is not just routine maintenance, but also managing cravings and triggers. An SOS option allows users to reach out to multiple close friends simultaneously via direct message, to access 911 or recovery support hotlines, and to watch a playlist of pre-recorded content to help move past cravings. The SOS option is available even without having a LiveLine account for immediate support.
Reflection
The depth of conversations I had with friends who drank or used drugs more than they even wanted to - as well as friends I didn't know were in recovery from addictions to drugs or alcohol - had opened my eyes to the ways substances impact our lives, especially if we are not conscious about our consumption. I had the joy of being an ally for recovery prior to starting this project, and what I learned while working on this helped me be a pillar of support for close friends struggling with addiction. I have never worked on a project for which I am more proud, and I hope to continue to work at the intersection of research, technology, health, and public service.
In a world absent COVID, I would have wanted to attend more open meetings, visit more treatment centers, and talk with more people in recovery within their sober environments. With more time, I would have liked to have done more diary studies with people in isolation with the goal of collecting more diverse viewpoints to better inform the design of something meant to function as well in a pandemic as outside it.
Lastly, if I was totally in charge of this project, I would have focused it on gay young adults. Homelessness, mental health disorders, and reliance upon substances are major issues faced within the gay community. While a product like LiveLine could have the potential to support content focused on a variety of gay experiences and improve the lives of gay people in recovery, I would have liked to give back to my community and ensure that my solution went beyond "compatible" with a gay user-base, but uplifted their unique challenges and successes in recovery.
A photo from my team's kick-off meeting including me, the four other members of my team, our two clients, and two subject-matter experts.