Week 18

This weeks presentation gave me the opportunity to plan my to-do-list. It provoked me to document my upcoming project tasks and identify them into 'vegetables' and 'puddings' or things we look forward to doing and things we do not - which is quite ironic because I like my veg. It was good to lay my plans out on paper so that I am able to put them plans into motion. I also had the opportunity to speak with my collective, we spoke about today's exercise, but we also presented our mark 1 presentations to each other. I really enjoyed seeing their projects flourish and we have agreed to make more of an effort to work together going forward.

I gauged from my presentation feedback that my booklet does not have to be so medical. I have decided that the booklet will be the same for each person whether they suffer from a mental health issue or not. CBT will be incorporate the same way in each book but will be a prolonged version so that the recovery process to heal a mental health condition can be sustainable, but also for people with no conditions. By implying the CBT technique into your everyday life, it will only have benefits, it could help to stop conditions forming and allow people to live a happier more positive life.

I think that it is important that I test out my product on real people, so, this week I had to act quickly to produce 6 booklets that I could hand out for people to trail for the month of March. Each booklet was identical, it contained the pages that I presented for my mark 1 prototype. These included daily and weekly planning sections, mindfulness exercises, fun activities and CBT pages. I positioned the CBT pages every Tuesday and Friday, I thought that this would be a good position as they are pretty spaced out and it allows free time for the weekend and on Mondays the there is opportunity for the user to plan the week, so Tuesday is a free day. There are also random activities dotted throughout the month this makes the booklet engaging to the user. Even though each journal is identical, the outcome of each experience will be completely different.

When handing out the booklets I also attached a questionnaire. I felt it was important to gather a bit of background on the individual, I wanted to know about their current lifestyle and way of living – the questionnaire is attached below. At the end of the month, I will do a post experiment interview with each participant, I would hope to see an improvement to their mental stability and lifestyle. I would also like to gauge how they interacted with the booklet and gather feedback to help with improvements for my final hand-in. I have given the booklet to a range of different people and age groups so each person will have different experiences with the content. I have expressed to them the importance that I will never see what they write within the journal, as I will not ask for it to be returned, this means that the user can be extremely honest with how they use the booklet. This is important because when the user is very open in the journal they will receive the most benefit. All that I will take from this user experience experiment is how they interact with said booklet.