Designing Visual Cards for Digital Mental Health Research with Ethnic Minorities

2021. Amid Ayobi, Annali Grimes, Sue Mackinnon, Ewan Soubutts, Rachel Eardley, Zoe Banks, Rachael Gooberman-Hill & Aisling O'Kane
Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference.

Abstract

Gaining an understanding of people's diverse mental health needs is essential for informing the design of inclusive mental health technologies. However, conversations about mental health experiences can be challenging for both researchers and participants. We present the design of visual cards that illustrate an inclusive mental health concept to support researchers and participants in understanding and sharing mental health experiences. We illustrate the iterative design of the visual cards with our reflections and feedback from ethnically diverse participants. We found that designing the visual cards fostered insightful reflections within the design team regarding the roles of identity, gender, and ethnicity in designing culturally sensitive content and research. Participants from minority ethnic backgrounds valued the illustrative elements of the visual cards and highlighted the importance of supporting different languages and visual cultures. We discuss use cases for the visual cards and implications for designing culturally sensitive mental health technologies.

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Citation

Ayobi, A., Grimes, A., Mackinnon, S., Soubutts, E., Eardley, R., Banks Gross, Z., … O'Kane, A. A. (2021). Designing visual cards for digital mental health research with ethnic minorities. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 942–954). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462085, doi:10.1145/3461778.3462085

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3461778.3462085,
author = {Ayobi, Amid and Grimes, Annali and Mackinnon, Sue and Soubutts, Ewan and Eardley, Rachel and Banks Gross, Zoe and Gooberman-Hill, Rachael and O'Kane, Aisling Ann},
title = {Designing Visual Cards for Digital Mental Health Research with Ethnic Minorities},
year = {2021},
isbn = {9781450384766},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462085},
doi = {10.1145/3461778.3462085},
abstract = {Gaining an understanding of people's diverse mental health needs is essential for informing the design of inclusive mental health technologies. However, conversations about mental health experiences can be challenging for both researchers and participants. We present the design of visual cards that illustrate an inclusive mental health concept to support researchers and participants in understanding and sharing mental health experiences. We illustrate the iterative design of the visual cards with our reflections and feedback from ethnically diverse participants. We found that designing the visual cards fostered insightful reflections within the design team regarding the roles of identity, gender, and ethnicity in designing culturally sensitive content and research. Participants from minority ethnic backgrounds valued the illustrative elements of the visual cards and highlighted the importance of supporting different languages and visual cultures. We discuss use cases for the visual cards and implications for designing culturally sensitive mental health technologies.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference},
pages = {942–954},
numpages = {13},
location = {Virtual Event, USA},
series = {DIS '21}
}