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Welcome to Elaina Boytor’s Research Portfolio! This showcases highlights from her 8 years as a design researcher working in service and product design research.

Elaina Boytor - Research Portfolio

Welcome to Elaina Boytor’s Portfolio! This showcases highlights from her 8 years as a design researcher working in service and product design research.

Driving impact and innovation through Design Research and Evaluation

I am a design researcher with a strong passion for focusing on experiences, products, and services that support the well-being of individuals. My areas of expertise are in surfacing foundation insights to inform strategy and design as well as evaluating the impact and implementation of programs and products.

My goal is to continue focusing on projects that allow me to create a meaningful social impact. I actively seek opportunities where I can contribute to the strategic direction of initiatives or organizations, as I am eager to be immersed in environments that foster innovation and drive positive change.


Design RESEARCH Projects

 

Foundational Framework: Health Care Mindsets

Foundational frameworks enable organizations to unify around a shared understanding of their users. Mindsets are a research-backed framework that enables organizations to create experiences that are tailored for the most common and specific mindsets rather than all users in general. I was thrilled to bring this shared understanding to Headspace through the Care Mindsets. While breaking ground as the organization’s first field researcher since before the pandemic, I surfaced deep ethnographic findings as I went to folks’ homes and discussed their mental health care journeys and experiences. Partnering with the service design team (design project lead: Trace Manuel), we created four care mindsets based on a matrix of how individuals seek care (structured or fluid) and why (for maintenance or repair) as shown in the framework visual here. These unique insights to understanding users unlocked new designs and strategic initiatives.

This framework continues to be the foundation for priorities and the strategic direction of multiple teams at Headspace including Product, Care Services, Sales, and Marketing. Sharing this understanding with partners and members has elevated Headspace as a leader in the landscape of digital mental health care.

 

Journey Map: Increasing Cross-product Access Points

Companies that develop enterprise products often face the challenge of how to integrate their app to create a seamless customer experience. This study tackled that very challenge. To understand how and where to effectively implement cross-product access points between two legal research, I conducted a diary study as well as a pre- and post-interview with individuals to gather insights on how they bounce between the two products; the image here shows the data for each participant across those multiple touchpoints. This project was a blend of discovery/foundational and evaluative research; I was able to pivot the product stakeholders’ request of wanting feedback on their designs into also including discovery research. I satisfied their initial request while also surfacing foundational insights that enabled us to create a journey map. We were also to iterate and create new research-backed designs for integration points for the product owners.

 

Strategic Research: MenTal Health Service Preferences

As we scaled the chat-based behavioral health coach offering at Headspace, there was a challenge to meet member demand while managing the Care Provider workload. This study surfaced insights to support the strategic decision to scale by moving the coaching offering from a drop-in support model to a scheduling model. Coaching service members were asked how well each model aligned with their needs and goals for mental health coaching. The image here is a visual representation of how the themes of members’ needs supported the hypothesis that members prefer the schedule-first model because it allowed for establishing a relationship with their coach. These insights gave the product and care provider teams the confidence needed to move the offering in that direction. This decision ultimately enabled scaling while alleviating the demand for the coaching service and workforce.

 

Design Research: Educational Programs Search App

If you’ve ever asked a talkative middle-schooler what they like to do, you know that amount of things they’re interested in is limitless. However, the places available to pursue those interests, while they’re out there, are often hard for them to find. The ExploreChi app was created by the Digital Youth Network at DePaul University to help kids and young adults in Chicago find and share programs that align with their interests. I supported the software development team by conducting user tests that evaluated if students would understand how to use the social media features adapted for our platform. I provided feedback and design recommendations for the development team ensuring that the development team created a platform that matched students with their interests.

 

Design Research: Improving Care Provider Workflow

One of the most rewarding aspects of working with Headspace was being able to provide support to the dedicated Care Providers as they supported the mental health goals of our members. One of the tasks that Care Providers often performed was to recommend content and tools to members that would help them reach their mental health goals. With the goal of informing the strategy for content recommendation, this study aimed to understand how Care Providers chose content that fit members’ needs and what their current workflows and thought processes were in making those recommendations. The insights surfaced in this study informed the design of an improved content recommendation experience for both our Care Providers and members.

 

User Testing: Mental Health Care Service ONboarding EXPERIENCE

Headspace, a meditation content app, and Ginger, a mental health care service, merged in 2021 holistic mental health care experience for users. The overall goal was to combine both experiences into a single app; however, this process was being rolled out in stages. The first stage in this one-app experience was to give users who were provided both Headspace and Ginger as employer-provided mental health care benefits access to both through a single shared credential. Using a single shared credential, users could enroll and onboard to both services. This study was conducted to assess if the communication around the single shared credential access was clear and easy to understand using a prototype of the onboarding experience. I also worked in some discovery research around users’ first impressions of the employer-provided mental health care benefit.

Design Research: IMPROVING THE ACCESSIBILITY OF GRAPHS

In 2016, the accessibility of visual data focused on a narrow set of web and products, and often only for professional or educational contexts. But what was accessibility like for visual data found in causal contexts? Our team wanted to understand how accessibility could be improved when consuming data meant for popular consumption, like news articles or magazines. This generative research explored the challenges faced by users who are blind as they interact with graphs in these more causal contexts. After conducting a needs analysis, we developed and tested alt-text descriptions of graphs with varying levels of detail. Based on our findings, we were able to come up with recommendations and design standards for designers to create accessible graphs. 

 

Design Research: Improving the VOLUNTEER Search

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Volunteering: it always seems like a lovely idea, but it can actually be pretty daunting to find impactful opportunities that are also rewarding experiences. The objective of this generative research was to surface what volunteers are looking for when they seek opportunities. Our research team researched the behaviors and motivations of volunteers they find the activities to create design recommendations for a creating volunteer matching product.

 

Impact Evaluation Projects

Program Evaluation: Partner School Case Study

The opportunity to measure and document the impact of a non-profit organization that has such a grand impact on learners, teachers, and communities was a true joy. Design for Change USA works with schools to teach students how to design and lead their own community projects with the goal of building empathy. When I was brought on as an Impact Evaluator, one of my goals was to create a case study of one of their partner high schools. Students, teachers, and community members from this high school shared their experiences and thoughts about participating in DFC USA with me. Their stories along with artifacts from the program were used to create a case study about the program’s ability to foster student’s passion for making a positive change in their community. These case studies continue to be used to promote participation and raise funding.

 

Implementation Evalauton: Edtech in Personalized Learning

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Working as a Research Analyst at LEAP Innovations, I lead the qualitative research and evaluation of the program initiatives to bring personalized learning into K-12 classrooms. As part of the LEAP Pilot Network program, participating educators were provided with edtech products to support their personalized learning practices. The edtech products were typically content-focused (Math or ELA); however, the program expanded the edtech offerings to include a Learning Management System (LMS) product. I was tasked with conducting research to understand how the LMS was implemented and the impact the product had on personalized learning in the classroom. I surfaced themes based on educator focus groups and included recommendations for improving the implementation of LMS products. 

 

Program evaluation: #DoGoodFromHome Challenge

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Can a hashtag change the world? The #DoGoodFromHome Challenge social media campaign aimed to do just that. Design for Change USA launched a campaign in March 2020 in response to shelter-in-place orders. DFC USA wanted to inspire families who wanted to give back during the COVID-19 pandemic from their homes. I conducted a digital ethnography of the social media campaign that documented major themes and characteristics of posts with the #DoGoodFromHome hashtag. I also summarized the lessons learned for the organization to better understand how to better support students going forward as they Feel, Imagine, Do, and Share remotely.

 

Program Evaluation: The Social Benefits of BLENDED LEARNING

Blending Learning environments, or instruction that takes place both in person and digitally, offer many opportunities to enrich a student’s education experiences. One of the areas of interest in Digital Youth Network's Blended Learning Project, funded by the NSF, was how peer-to-peer interactions in Blending Learning can help to create meaningful social learning. As a research assistant, I conducted digital ethnographies on our organization’s social learning platform as well as in-person interviews with students. I was able to contribute to solidifying the major themes of social learning that were included in our team’s journal submissions. I also called out design recommendations for improving blended-learning experiences on our social learning platform and in our after-school programming. 

 

Implementation Evaluation: community-level problem-solving

Can maps help students make sense of the needs of their community? Mobile City Science, a project based out of the University of Washington College of Education led by Katie Headrick Taylor, was on a mission to prove the power of maps and create a program that can be used with students in every community. The program introduces youth to mapping literacies and technologies through a series of outdoor, community-based activities. These activities help students map the existing assets in their communities and then identify assets they feel are needed from their perspective as young people. The program ran in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood during the fall of 2016. I served as an MCS implementer, and here is my blog post about that experience.