Tackling the Mental Health Crisis: Improving Access to Counselors for Students

Mental health is an ongoing challenge for students today, and our design team took on the task of addressing one aspect of this crisis—improving access to counselors. Our goal was to create a solution that would help students more easily and privately book appointments with their counselors, as well as offer additional mental health resources.

We envisioned an app that not only streamlined the appointment scheduling process but also provided helpful resources like breathing exercises, peer connections, and referrals to outside therapists and mental health professionals.

To kick off the project, we developed user personas for both students and counselors. This allowed us to identify pain points, needs, and motivations for each group, which formed the foundation of our empathy phase. By understanding both perspectives, we could better design a solution that addressed the real challenges users face.

Our most valuable insights came from conducting surveys and user interviews. These conversations revealed the key barriers to mental health access for students, such as privacy concerns, a lack of time, and fear of stigma. Armed with this information, we refined our app’s goals and features to better meet the needs of students and counselors.

Next, we moved into creating an initial low-fidelity prototype. This allowed us to visualize the core functionality and test the app's usability with users. Feedback from this testing phase led to key refinements, which we applied to create our high-fidelity prototype—a polished version of the app that better aligned with user needs and expectations.

Although the project is still in its early stages, we’re proud of the progress we’ve made in designing a tool that has the potential to make a real difference for students and their counselors. Mental health access is a critical issue, and we believe that Counselor Connect can play a meaningful role in helping students get the support they need, when they need it.