Featback is an online self-help program for people with eating problems. Someone has an eating disorder (ED) when their whole life revolves around food and body image (Saha et al., 2022). Featback is developed by GGZ Rivierduinen Eetstoornissen Ursula. It has proven to be effective in reducing ED symptoms (Aardoom et al., 2016a; Rohrbach et al., 2022). For eight weeks, users have to answer four questions per week. Based on these questions, they receive one of 1250 handwritten personal messages. Even though Featback is effective, not many people use it.
Project goal: Make Featback appeal to more adolescents who are struggling with a developing eating problem or eating disorder.
The target group is adolescents, as most people develop their eating disorder as a teen. It takes years before people seek help (de la Rie et al., 2008). However, the sooner someone gets help, the better the chance of recovery (Zipfel & et al., 2015). So, more adolescents must find Featback at the beginning of their eating problems.
Research questions are created to achieve the project goal. These are answered by using contextmapping and literature research.
People do not recognise an ED because of stigmas, denial and poor mental health literacy. Many believe only thin, young, white girls have EDs (Romano & Lipson, 2019). People with an ED do not recognise themselves in this image. Not even when they are extremely underweight. Additionally, people of all sizes, genders and ages can suffer from an ED.
Because it is found that people do not recognise an ED and thus are not looking for (online)help, the design must improve mental health literacy.
The design goal is: Create a website that helps adolescents who are developing an eating disorder improve their mental health literacy regarding eating disorders, to increase self-awareness, so that they will seek help sooner.
The redesign
In phase 1: Mental health literacy, users are educated on eating problems. They get presented with stories of situations related to eating problems. They are asked to judge these stories; his creates distance between the user and the story and creates an interactive experience.
In Phase 2: Recognition, users can do a self-test to create recognition for their eating problems. The self-test results guide them to Phase 3: Help.
In phase 3, users can make use of the online help. They can directly start with week one of the eightweek program without creating an account. In this way, users can experience the interaction without committing, lowering the threshold to use Featback.
The redesign is evaluated with ED patients and experts.
Conclusion
The redesign helps young people understand eating problem symptoms better and stimulates them to seek help. People with an ED feel seen by the website and can reflect on their own behaviour using the stories. The redesign must use other platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Proud2Bme to attract people to the website. Finding help is hard for people with EDs; they need encouragement to do so. They often do not believe they deserve help. A safe space like fEATback can lower this threshold.