Thrive App Research

Thrive Surveys helped us catapult our App Research. Thrive Surveys ran 13 times over the course of 3 years, with almost 1000 responses from our students each time. The surveys provided us quantitative and qualitative data about our users wellbeing, how they are coping, and if they would seek help

Key takeaways

• Approx 20% of students seek help from websites, apps or other digital help tools
• They don’t want to pay for apps
• Apps are not personalised as per their needs
• Privacy is a major concern especially when it comes to mental health tools
• Stigma and negative beliefs about help seeking is a major barrier to students getting help

Conducted user group sessions with students for another mental health app used by universities and health services.

Key takeaways

• Students are concerned about their data and privacy
• They would like to know why an app seeks so many permissions.
• Battery drainage is a major concern.
• A hard to understand interface was a major barrier to using the app.

Conducted Preliminary research to find our about currently available tools and their efficacy to support mental and cognitive health

What we found

• Potential tools and techniques such as Pomodoro, mindfulness, and mental health literacy, that can be leveraged in a digital way with the help of an app
• We explored what other direct-indirect competitors in the field are doing and what was working both commercially and not-for-profit, some of the following might look familiar:

User research began after gaining the above insights and understanding more about our achievable objectives and our main users

What we did

• Conducted User Interviews and Surveys.
• Created User persona, Empathy maps and User journeys.
• Feature workshops.
• UX testing.

With the help of 78 students who participated in our 6 week trial with an MVP version of the app.

Key objectives from this trial was to:

• To get deeper insights into user behaviour and needs and wants.
• Test the current deployed features and seek feedback about improving and expanding them
• Gain insights for future features and how they would work
• Test the language of the app and if its sits well with our users
• Test the usability and face validity of the app and its features
• Increase Mental health literacy, reduce stigma, and promote early help seeking

Result highlights

• App scored high in usability and was considered consistent, intutive and fun to use

211 students enrolled for the 12 weeks trial of Beta version of the app.

Key objectives from this trial was

• All the objectives from the above MVP trial
• Testing Efficacy of the tool with mental health related outcomes
• Ensure we are testing using both industry and research standard tools such as the Usability Scale and the Mobile App Rating Scale

Result highlights

• Increased rates of help seeking intention and awareness about mental health

The Monash Thrive app is now available for download on your Apple App Store and GooglePlay Store. The app has incorporated numerous feedback from the previous trials and is launching with new features which were requested throughout the trial. We learn and grow based on our users feedback, and put their needs at the forefront of our deliverables. As such we have created our latest version of the Monash Thrive app with a wide range of resources to rival any commercial app available now.
To ensure our user feels safe and secure in using the app we have ensured the Monash Thrive app does not collect user data, and everything is locked away behind their own PIN or biometric login. All mood check-ins and diary entries, all pomodoro or productivity timers, all character names and customisations are only stored on the users phone and remains always under their control. All of their use data can be easily and permanently deleted by either deleting their account from within the app, or uninstalling their app at anytime.