Kicking Off the Brainstorming Session

Our team decided to have brainstorming session to figure out what are potential questions and solutions we can come up with it to reiterate the website into a MVP. We agreed on five key features:

1. Gamification System (Earning medals and points after completing a challenge)

2. Social Anxiety Challenges (Daily or Weekly)

3. Stats of the user’s medals and challenge completion in the dashboard

4. Emoji Rating and Journaling after completing challenges

5. Resources for tips

White Paper Research

Conducting secondary research helped to understand our target audience and the types of challenge we could potentially create. Key factors while reading through academic articles were:

• Common social situations that most people with social anxiety avoid are dating, meeting new people, starting conservations, and attending gatherings/parties.

• If social anxiety is left untreated, it could impair social skills, self-esteem, academics, social relationships, criticism, and employment.

• People with social anxiety in these specific situations can experience symptoms such as internal discomfort, fear of negative evaluation, avoidance, awkward behaviors, and physical symptoms such as hand sweating, stuttering, redness, etc.

• Few ways to deal with social anxiety is keeping a journal, taking a particular challenging task and divide into smaller parts, therapy/support group, and meditation.

Competitive Analysis

Overall, we found from other competitor apps that include either social anxiety or gamification that:

1. Users don’t want the system to be complex but simple and easy to use.

2. The same goes for UI Design - it needs to be inviting and calm.

Opportunities we could do is create challenges relating to a specific social situation and create a simple gamification system to decrease cognitive load.

User Interview and User Survey – Key Findings

We conducted a user survey with 42 responses and 5 user interviews. A few key findings we found interesting were:

• 79% of participants in the user survey choose meeting new people and being present at an event the most as the trigger point for their social anxiety.

• About 60% of the participants in the user interview have said they got social anxiety because of past experiences; it led them to have social anxiety in their teen days.

• About 60% of participants in the user interview need to prepare themselves for that certain event or they will start over thinking about their actions.

Here are what a few participants said in the user interview:

“That's like kind of a way that I mask my autism so that I don't like to seem very unapproachable, and this especially happens with I am meeting new people. I also feel like I kind of sweat a little bit, but people can't really notice, because they're not up that close.” - HG, STEM advocator

“I feel like the main reason might be like people checking on me because I recognize that I might have, like some self-judgment, and I might be like reflecting that self-judgment on people. So, I kind of like prepared in an event for that.” – Gina, College Student