batyr.com.au
Creating a digital tool to build connection & resilience in rural communities
Categories: Mental Health
Batyr is a preventative mental health charity, created and driven by young people, for young people. Batyr’s purpose is to engage, educate and empower by providing the knowledge and skills to lead mentally healthy lives. Batyr’s vision is that all young people are engaged in positive conversations about mental health and are empowered to reach out for support when needed.
Client
Isaac Peiris – Innovation & Partnerships
Courtney Bilske – Community Partnerships
Time
2 weeks
Team
Paula White – Service Designer
Robert Bruno – Service Designer
Aleksandra Skibola – Service Designer
Joshua Dema – UX Designer
Felipe Gorsten – UX Designer
Deliverables
Persona
Service Blueprint
Value proposition
UI Prototype & Usability testing
My contribution
Research
Interviews
Synthesis
Ideating
Concept Development
Presenting
The Challenge
The summer of 2019/20 saw the worst bushfires Australia has experienced. In response to this disaster, Batyr developed a bushfire response plan to build community resilience and facilitate early interventions to support the mental health of people in affected communities. While pursuing the project, they identified a significant geographical barrier in reaching these communities with their current face-to-face programs.
With this problem in mind Batyr wanted us to look for ideas that could utilise new technologies to build connection and resilience in communities so that they would be better equipped to provide early interventions through peer-to-peer mental health support when responding to crises.
The Process
Over two weeks, we followed a distinct four step design process, taking an iterative co-design approach with the design team and Batyr. The first week consisted of research, synthesising our findings and defining patterns. In the second week we broke down these insights to deliver a proposed concept, that we were able to develop, test and iterate to propose a final solution.
Discovery
We started the project by conducting desktop research and reviewing the extensive resource material supplied to us by Batyr.
6 One-to-one interviews
3 Internal Bartyr staff interviews
Desktop research
Existing resource material
Creating Resilience
We started by first understanding how resilience is created in a community – especially in the context of disaster resilience. We discovered two themes; by taking physical action to prepare and reduce risk for a disaster, putting safety precautions into the community helped build resilience. Additionally, increasing and improving social networks, leadership and support systems during and after a disaster significantly increased community resilience.
“Greater connection to the community enhances resilience and increases access to support services. It promotes information sharing and collective responsibility to mitigate the negative impacts of disaster, whilst increasing the likelihood of timely recovery once the immediate effects of disaster are over, leading to restoration of independence and enhanced autonomy.” – ACYP Disaster resilience framework
We summarised our findings into four tactical ways to create resilience in communities:
Social connection
Growth and identity
Community inclusion and,
Disaster preparedness
Who to solve for?
We identified two groups that we were solving for, the end users of batyrs services the young people between the ages of 18-30y/o and the target customers the GateKeepers in communities. This is because reaching out to rural and regional communities can be difficult unless you can access the gatekeeper and bring them onboard with Batyr’s current programs. We saw an opportunity here, gatekeepers could play a bigger role in supporting Batyr’s vision and reach out directly to young adults, becoming the advocates for Batyr.
Initial themes synthesis
The results generated from the discovery phase gave us deep insight into the problem area. We were able to summarise this into three key factors.
Youth perspective is overlooked
Bringing in outside facilitators, and
Community Stigma Towards Mental Health
2. Define
After defining our audience we were able to create a proto-persona James. He would be highly beneficial in turing into a Batyr advocate, he has access to the wider community enabling him to build connection and foster resilience within that community
We then started to create some how might we statements based on our insights and the problem areas found during our research. These would then be used to help us brainstorm new ideas and address opportunity areas.
HMW equip the community to take charge of their mental wellbeing and reduce stigma so that they become self-reliant/independent from outside support services.
HMW encourage community advocates (gate keepers) to build connections with multiple communities, in order to foster resilience.
HMW empower residents in rural/remote communities to collectively be better prepared for crises.
From these we simplified there message into key principles we needed to adhere to: Self-reliance, connection, preparation, build awareness & reduce stigma.
3. Develop
Using the brainstorming ideation tool crazy 8’s, the team generated 40 creative ideas. We grouped these ideas into categories, such as community hub, crisis preparation, and personal mental health. In order to narrow down our scope the team voted on ideas that would be most beneficial and desirable for community leaders.
Based on the clients desire to utilise new technologies we grouped all the ideas in the digital space and discovered that some ideas could combine together as a single tool (an app) to help James build resilience and connection in his community.
Crazy 8s
Digital themes
Our next challenge was incentivising James to use the app by providing him with a sense of purpose. It was imperative that we understood how the app would not only benefit the community but also benefit him. Our goal was to help James harness the power of the app to create a unified ecosystem of leaders, sharing their lived experiences, resources and strategies with the one focus of building resilience within remote communities, and it is with that purpose that we came up with the Batyr Ambassador’s program.
Recruited ambassadors will bring communities together by supporting young adults to have a voice and implement disaster recovery processes. Their connection with other community ambassadors will be facilitated through the app, where past and present disaster experiences, strategies, tools and methods are shared with one another so that the community is better prepared.
Concept Poster: Ambassador Program
Though we have identified the user of the program we needed to define key traits and behaviours that make an Ambassador, this would ensure the success of the program. We then built a strategic roadmap for the program rolling it out in two phases. The first phase of the program would be to establish the connection from Ambassador to Ambassador, positioned within their own silo communities, sharing their knowledge and experiences. Phase two would be members of the whole community using the app, helping to spread Batyr’s reach, and further unifying the community. In order to validate if the program was viable we used a value proposition canvas, which led us to creating the value proposition statement.
Value proposition canvas
Value proposition statement
4. Deliver
The UX team then started the process of iterating and testing a digital prototype. Starting with an MVP Matrix to consider the digital features on a scale of value to our user, against a scale of ease of implementation.
Through two rounds of low-fidelity prototype testing and one round of high-fidelity prototype testing which was received positively with an average rating of 8.5 out of 10
“Really love the idea of the scoring system”
“I like how it visualises the support network. It’s my favourite part of the app!”
The app will be James’s number one tool to help him build resilience and connection in his community as well as being inspired by other Ambassadors from different communities, but the app is just one touchpoint in his experience with the community.
We created a future service blueprint that goes into detail about the interactions James will have with Batyr, his various touch-points and what support processes will be going on behind the scenes.
Service blueprint
Outcome
The Ambassadors program would replace the “regional coordinates” inside the existing disaster relief program. The enhancement will provide the opportunity for Batyr to create an ecosystem of community leaders that will share their experiences and resources within the app. The app will be the main tool to measure success of community engagement, programs and ongoing events, and the key touchpoint for Ambassadors to reach out to other Ambassadors.
The service offering the team created was well received by Batyr. Our client Isaac Peiris informed us only days after handover that initial conversations with senior management about next steps towards implementing a platform like the Ambassadors program have already started.
Reflection
During the process we were limited by time constraints and access to rural communities, due to the sensitivity of the topic of mental health it was difficult to approach interviewees and during the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions within Victoria did not allow us access, this resulted in only a proto-persona being created.
Though we collaborated closely with Batyr to ensure we had a common understanding of our audience, additional research will need to be conducted to create a detailed persona - uncovering specific pain points and behavioural traits so that we can ensure the service offerings are meeting their needs, ultimately helping to validate the desirability for the Ambassador program. Next steps for the program would be for Batyr to create steps to launch the program and to start the community leader recruitment process.
Client Feedback
“I just wanted to say a sincere thank you again- working in this batyr space for sometime now I've always been hoping we could come up with innovative ways of engaging our regional Herd. What you have all achieved is such a ‘beaut’ spot for us to continue to explore and action.My country kid self is so excited!!.”
— Courtney Bilske, Community Partnerships
“I’m blown away by the concept you and the team have put forward, and by the incredible depth of research and testing you were able to validate this idea with in just two weeks.”
— Isaac Peiris, Innovation & Partnerships