Rob Jurewicz
A product designer focused on building the tools people need to push ahead
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A product designer focused on building the tools people need to push ahead
→ CityBase Wallet
→ CityBase Citizen Profile
→ Gaia Wearables UX
→ Résumé
Gaia Wearables App
Timeframe:
3 Weeks
3 Weeks
Team Role:
UX Designer
Three person team
UX Designer
Three person team
Tools:
Axure
Sketch
Miro
Axure
Sketch
Miro
Introduction
Gaia is a company spun up by a team of students at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Headed by Brent Chase, whose younger brother was diagnosed with autism at a young age, they share a passion for coming up with creative digital and physical solutions to problems that families with children with autism have faced for years. After finishing their capstone project, they took this idea further by winning a series of grants, most recently invited to present their product at SXSW. They presented our team with a new emotion-moderating vest called PAL. It is a device that reads biometric data from the person wearing it, and if sensed from this data that they were about to reach a meltdown level, it would contract around them simulating the feeling of a hug.
The Gaia team had created a few mock-ups of a mobile app to give a visual interface to users to read the data reported from the vest, but they came to us to use research and design thinking methods to look into what their users would need and want from this product.
Example video of the prototype vest in action.
Discovery
Learning about issues around autism and how they affect families
Each member of our team only had limited exposure to autism and the effects that diagnosis has on families. With our constraint of time and previous knowledge, we left the more direct device-related aspects to the team at Gaia, and we focused on the user interface side and learning about what the families deal with on a day-to-day basis. After our kick-off meeting with the client and early research to gather a baseline, we came up with the following hypotheses:
- To prevent meltdowns in the future, parents/people with ASD need a mobile tool to understand what caused the meltdown in the first place.
- PAL will improve the life of a person with ASD by providing a digital and tangible product to track, prevent, and understand the meltdown.
I felt at this point; these definitions were going to work to keep us on track without narrowing in too far on a small feature set. It gave us a framework to search for competitors as well as direction while learning about a disorder that has a vast range of severity and treatment.
Competitors
With this framework in mind, we took to looking at the market to see where Gaia’s PAL fit into the marketplace, and where there were opportunities.Wearables Initially, my teammates looked more into wearable space. Fun & Function, Squease Wear, and Pressure Vest were all creating wearable products that used weight and/or air compression to attempt to comfort a person in a stressful situation. Unfortunately, these products are relatively bulky and require various levels of supervision. They also offer no link to any digital products used to track biometrics. In turn, a parent or caretaker would have to find one of these products separately if they want to monitor the long-term usage of these wearables.
Fun & Function
Pressure Vest
Squeeze Vest
SmartSteps guiding the user through a stressful situation
Achieving a positive result from process. But if you press (1) “Did This Help?”...
...it kicks the user out of the app (2) to this confusing webform
SmartSteps is for a person with autism directly. When they find themselves in a stressful situation, it strives to ask the right questions to get them out of said situation. Being that this is for high-stress moments, the trap of sending the person to an overwhelming survey page outside the app right after the case could trigger another episode instead of letting them cool down.
TantrumTracker’s manual entry form for a “tantrum”
There are multiple views. Here is the list view of a child’s tantrums...
...And here is the calendar, demonstrating the volume of inputting the artaker has to do
TantrumTracker
TantrumTracker is an app for caretakers of children with autism, ADHD and ADD to track the outbursts that mark their lives. Being able to keep this tracking in one place can be used to find patterns in behavior that can be used to reinforce good behaviors and remove triggers. The app is entirely manual which puts a significant burden on the caretaker to fill out these forms during high-stress situations.
Results
What I did find was heartbreaking. A ton of complex apps that are not well thought out for their use cases. Parent-facing apps featured extensive interaction requirements and a high learning curve. Apps aimed at children and adults with autism had many traps that could turn a meltdown into a full-on crisis. At any point in these apps, the user could fall into broken paths or worse, facing something wholly new and overwhelming. In our research, we found that sudden change is a massive trigger of meltdowns and these apps often used inconsistent styles and even kick the user out to a mobile website with an entirely different look mid-usage.
There is a massive hole for automation of any sort. I found time and time again tracking apps full of complex forms asking for manual input of complex data. While in our research we saw that parents of children with autism would go out of their way to educate themselves on the ins and outs of parenting these children, they had little time to mess with an app that forces them to manually input significant amounts of data.
One other thing we were considering was how a digital or physical product empowers their lives. From the very start, the name TantrumTracker, this particular one does not. Choosing the right language can make a huge difference in how someone experiences a product as we found out while conducting user interviews.
User Interviews
We then conducted exploratory interviews with eight potential users and subject matter experts to try and find answers to many questions. Our overall goal was gaining first-hand accounts of how our users deal with day to day life when taking care of a child with autism. To obtain a better understanding of how people currently prevent and deal with meltdowns, but then also to find out about any techniques or technology they use to track the child’s behavior, habits, schedule, etc., and whether PAL combined with a mobile app would solve any of their needs or frustrations.
- Parents didn’t have much time to fill out complicated reports to keep a record of outbursts. Thus, they don’t keep detailed records.
- Manually entering tracking data is too much for parents and aides due to their busy lifestyle which makes it difficult to share information between all parties who care for the child.
Dropping support
- There are mandatory services until graduation from high school, but afterward, it can become a considerable challenge and burden on the parents to continue.
- Meltdown triggers revolve around three main areas: sensory issues, difficulty when presented with something new, and the individual’s rigidity in thought and behavior.
- Examples of transition issues include:
• Handoff to a caregiver
• Last minute schedule changes
• New Services
Independence building
- Decision-making skills are generally weak and can only improve with practice.
- Over time these skills can be improved enough for many children to live independently.
- Their scheduling must be visual and not just verbally communicated to increase decision making skill.
Coming into the project our team realized the scope of ages and degrees on the spectrum was very wide and it probably wouldn’t be likely we would use a one-size-fits-all solution. With our set of data, as a group, we looked at the situation and decided to focus on “parents of 18-24-year-old young adults with autism”. By concentrating on those children who have the most significant chance of becoming independent adults, we believe that we had an opportunity to create a high level of impact with the data we had. Parents need tools for the child to start to live a separate life, and for the parent to have peace of mind that their child is okay. In the future, there are many angles Gaia will need to address on including parents, younger children, older children, and the differences along the spectrum.
Definition: The problem to solve
As our team all agreed that this was shining through the data we had gathered, it allowed us to move on to problem definition. We could start to consider how to translate this into bite-sized pieces for ourselves and our clients to move forward. To communicate our plan, we looked at our audience, their pains, and all we learned so far to create a single problem statement.
Parents of teenagers with autism who hope their children can gain some independence need a mobile app that helps parents manage their daily lives and communication with their children and those involved in their care. With this tool, they hope to identify patterns related to their stress levels that can lead them towards a more independent life.
We felt with this combination of wearable technology, automatic digital management, and communication tools; we would be able to accelerate the process of gaining independence. To help us stay on track with those goals we built design principles to guide us in mapping our next phases of design work.
Create Consistency
There should be a regularity to the product interactions, so it doesn’t create surprises
Low Learning Curve
Should be usable by a broad set of users as they will have drastically different needs and backgrounds
A Calm Voice
Used during times of stress, its design should promote a feeling of calm and increase the sense of being in control
Remain Focused
The technology should not reach too far and fall into the background during everyday life. We don’t want it to be a constant task.
We identified that these tools should help automate the manual tracking activities that parents are not able to keep up with. In turn, our principles are keeping in mind specifically that we don’t want them to have to spend significant time within the product and that people are using it with different levels of technical knowledge, so it can’t be overly complicated to see necessary information. We want it to feel like a safety blanket of reassurance during life changes for the parent and child.
When presenting the data to our clients, but it was apparent they were looking and expecting a younger target audience from us. With the client's hard science background, we were able to show them how the data was supporting our decisions. Each target audience eventually needs attention anyway, so to maximize the value Gaia got out of our UX team's work, we would work on the areas where we had the most data. Being able to point out that going in the direction they were expecting, we would be basing our work on the same assumptions we came in with and not based on the new data and insights we provided Gaia was successful.
Ideation: Creating divergent concepts
Upon conducting many ideation techniques including 6-8-5 sketching, braindumps, word maps, and more, we each worked out concepts that featured different ways for management of children with autism's emotional well being in hopes of being able to loosen the reins over an extended period. We looked at these three different angles and sketched out multiple ideas to test within them to validate a final path.
- Parent and child-facing
- Using scheduling to slowly feed a child more decision making power and allow them to gain their independence in a controlled manner.
- Allowing children to see a simplified version of their data generated so they can self-regulate when they feel scared or anxious.
- Parent-facing
- Giving different levels of control to parents to learn patterns by giving them all the raw data they could look at the spikes and lows over time to determine what the causes were for meltdowns.
- Give ways to share this data with the teams of people involved in the care of their children.
- Parent-facing
- Showing the data in contextual ways instead of displaying the unfiltered data.
- Gives ways to send reports to the people involved in the care of their child quickly and efficiently to cut down on miscommunication.
Test results
We put these concepts in front of users to determine their usefulness and desirability. Knowing the limited amount of time, we needed to tighten in on a specific area that would be of most value to our potential users. Because of that same time crunch, for this round of testing, I thought to print out all the slides so we could physically draw on them in different colors which brought a whole new way to synthesize visually by drawing with different colors on one set of drawings to quickly start to identify patterns. It spoke to my visual side in ways the affinity diagram usually doesn’t as it is entirely contextual with the concept as it sits. We found a couple of results that helped us focus our attention and solve some lingering questions:
Product prioritization
Users talked to are already using an iCal/Google Calendar solution and found it to be something they could teach. This new insight pushed us away from the last of our child-facing sides of the app we had considered and allowed us to focus strictly on the caretakers.
Users talked to are already using an iCal/Google Calendar solution and found it to be something they could teach. This new insight pushed us away from the last of our child-facing sides of the app we had considered and allowed us to focus strictly on the caretakers.
The thing caretakers didn’t have access to currently was the data automation being output from PAL The only problem is, testers didn’t know what to do with much of this information and wanted it in more consumable chunks.
Parents wanted more options than merely initiating the compression hug on their child’s vest. These included personalizing the length, frequency, repeatability of the compression of the vest depending on their child’s needs over time.
– Most Testers
When presented with raw data, every tester asked this question when referring to not knowing what to do with this raw data.
Iteration and convergence:
A potential roadblock:Up to our last week working on this project, we had been concepting with the information given to us by our client that mostly focused on the PAL vest and its ability to sense an oncoming meltdown and it's “hugging” feature that would mitigate the situation.It turns out, they pivoted away from crisis mitigation and were now focusing entirely on assessment. This presented us with an initial shock, but I quickly realized we had been designing this digital product to be scalable as the Gaia team added more wearable gear outside of the PAL vest, and presented that fact. I proceeded to talk to them about how, thanks to that initial planning for scale, we were not going to lose the ground gained so far, and it would only take minimal tweaks to continue which we were able to achieve.
Iteration:To kick off the final sprint, we created a flow that limited the steps in the app a parent needed to go to in any direction to achieve their goal of opening it. I specifically wanted this to be an app that wasn’t a chore as our design principles stated. We wanted there to be a low number of steps to go from opening it to whatever piece of information the user would be looking for.
Focusing on three main areas of this flow, we split the tasks accordingly so that we could prototype the main status page, the family/doctor/teacher network and sharing pages, and the reports page.
Swiping across the dates on the top (1) shows earlier days for quick access of previous data and emotional states
Home
In the process of building independence, we wanted parents to immediately see their child’s current status as soon as possible to put them at ease. In turn, the status page acted as a defacto homepage as we wanted to cut down the steps to see that piece. Our team deliberated the chart visualization, but we decided there would need to be further testing for the prime solution. Parents could edit this page to customize the precise amount of synthesized or raw data they find useful.
Takeaways:
Moving up a fidelity level revealed an opposite reaction in testing, from not wanting much in the form of data, this time users wanted to see all of it, and then figure out what is useful to filter out over time on their own.
My Circle
This page shows all the people involved in the care of a child. There needs to be a place for everyone: Family members, teachers, therapists, doctors and even neighbors. Each page has, at the minimum, simple contact information and the reports sent to and from each. Editing is simple with a large edit button at the bottom.
Takeaways:
People we tested with appreciated the concept of being able to store all of the people related to the care of their children in one place and the ability to send updates easily.
Flexibility required here due to the vast nature of people involved in the care of a child with autism.
The sharing function helps keep everyone involved with the care of a child able to be in the know by adding them (1) to a report.
Share
Single pieces of data or entire reports are sharable. We wanted to keep the steps to a minimum while still keeping it simple, to align with our design principles. The person using the app could immediately select who to send it to while being able to check it.
Takeaways:
There were a few lapses in matching our prototype to our users' mental models involving the amount of information saved in the My Circle section as well as when searching for previously sent reports that would become the next steps we would have had another week to continue.
Reports
This page is all about generating reports. My focus when building these was to keep a balance of customization, without giving full paralysis of choice. Tiles are similarly editable as the current status page, but the time frames are more standardized so that reports do not jump around too much.
Takeaways:
Users found being able to see the charts of daily dips and peaks in levels with times and locations indicated is useful, but we could alter the data visualization to convey the metrics better.
To customize the home screen, press and hold on a tile (1) opens the edit mode following the pattern of iOS and Android’s home screens.
Evaluation and future steps
We performed one last round of usability testing to see if our newly converted product met our initial goals. Validating the decisions we made effectively make caretakers jobs easier was essential to set up our future recommendations to Gaia before final handoff.
Positives
The primary tasks of the app were easy to accomplish. Users got to the data they wanted to see right at the beginning and appreciated the variety of data available for them to sort through.
Editable dashboard:
As mentioned above, users wanted to see everything at first but believed over time that they could slowly peel back the data they didn't use or know how to translate. Further testing would be required to see if they actually would follow through with this.
Seeing time and location in context with the data made our users feel it was more actionable. They talked about being able to put together patterns, but the testers were not all in sync on the data visualizations sot hey probably would need more testing.
My Circle organization:
They immediately understood this page and were able to get to the information they were looking for in very few steps. They liked being able to go straight into sending a report from this page instead of having to backtrack to the reports page.
Our findings were that the overall reaction to the app to falls right into our goal of it being easy to use, but we did find places for them to improve over time.
Areas to improve
There needs to be a more central repository for previously sent and potentially received reports. Because we were focusing on the parent, we looked heavily at what they would send out, but not as much at the point-of-view of the recipient.
There was some confusing language for testers that we would like to have a few more rounds of testing to round into final shape.
Roadmap
Onboarding:
Similar to the last project, we wanted testing to define the pain points that would require any further education in an onboarding flow. We think another round of ideation and testing would be necessary to make a definite call on what those elements might be.
Icons and labeling:
Throughout our testing, we found different caretakers using different language to describe the aspects of daily life. More rounds of testing are required to further hone in on most common language.
Data visualization:
A considerable UI challenge that will take significant care to make sure it’s presenting the right amount of information and in an understandable manner. Opinions on these elements were scattered, and due to not having a large volume of testers, we did not find definitive directions. This would need further validation and iteration.
Similar to the last project, we wanted testing to define the pain points that would require any further education in an onboarding flow. We think another round of ideation and testing would be necessary to make a definite call on what those elements might be.
Icons and labeling:
Throughout our testing, we found different caretakers using different language to describe the aspects of daily life. More rounds of testing are required to further hone in on most common language.
Data visualization:
A considerable UI challenge that will take significant care to make sure it’s presenting the right amount of information and in an understandable manner. Opinions on these elements were scattered, and due to not having a large volume of testers, we did not find definitive directions. This would need further validation and iteration.
More interviews that target the younger age group:
A limitation to our data was a lack of insight from the users we interviewed and tested about the current struggles of parents of children with autism in their pre-teen and teen years. With the rise of smartphones, tablets, apps and the modern internet, life has been changing very quickly for caretakers, and we would want to learn about what is going on right now for these people.
The child facing side:
We wouldn't build based entirely off of assumptions, so we did not tackle that side what-so-ever after the concept phase. The child-facing side of the app is a substantial long-term requirement, so considerable resources should be directed at this goal.
Personal reflection:
Designing for an audience with new types of needs during my last project at Designation threw up a ton of new exciting challenges my way. As designers, I feel we often get onto the happiest scenario of someone with a giant Retina Display that is tech-savvy, and it was a challenge and a reminder that there is still a broad swath of people that don’t have these skills. The simple act of being able to talk to these people and share their pain as they tried to set up a video call was invaluable. The empathy gained in those situations was crucial when prioritizing features in a way to not overwhelm them with the final product.
The Gaia project was my final full project at Designation, and it became the culmination of what I had learned from my previous projects as well as previous jobs. I’ve spent a spent a lot of time honing my skills at working with demanding clients in stressful situations, and on this project, I took this aspect of my previous career and was able to merge those skills with my UX skillet I’ve been building here at Designation.
I used my previous design background when the path seemed vague to point our team in a direction that allowed us to be flexible when client goals seemed to shift under our feet. The reason I came to Designation, and what I excitedly got to present, was “the why” when we had to veer away from client expectations to give a confident explanation about the decisions made. I’ve rarely been able to use hard data outside of printer restrictions in this way, and it was like a whole new world to be confident in decisions not just with intuition or previous experience, but from hard data.
Work
→ CityBase Wallet
→ CityBase Citizen Profile
→ Gaia Wearables UX
Connect
→ Résumé