PALBud
Design for mobile app
Overview
PAL or PALBUD is an app designed to streamline care between caregivers, therapists, and autistic children. My Team wanted to explore in-app goal planning for therapists to assign to clients.
I was in charge of the IA and overall flow of in-app goal planning and tracking. I also designed new components that aligned with our branding to aide our future design system.
Role
Team
1 UX Researcher, 2 PMs, and 5 Designers. Each designer had complete autonomy of their work.
Timeline
6 weeks
Version A
Before designing, I got familiar with the current version of the app and its ability to add exercises. Since exercises are basically short-term goals or interventions that a client is supposed to complete during the week, I was hoping to build off of them.
Once an exercise has been created complete with steps and an assignment date, the therapist presses “done” and assigns it to their client by pressing “Assign” in the top right corner.
User interviews
Once I got a better understanding of the app, the next step was to get a better understanding of our users. In this case, the therapists. I conducted an audit of previous research to see if there were insights I could pull.
Key insights I found after synthesizing user interviews from 14 therapists were some of the top challenges they faced in working with autistic children were: managing behavior, communicating with the care team including caregivers, as well as keeping children engaged.
Managing behavior and keeping children engaged were two challenges that could possibly be mitigated by an in-app goal feature.
Competitive analysis
Care plans in the healthcare field are evidence-based plans to guide practice in order to facilitate clients in reaching their goals. To get a better understanding of how therapists use them, I gathered IEPs and care plans from various internet sources. I then compared them with the app, Manatee, which is an indirect competitor of PAL. I wanted to see how goals are tracked throughout time both within apps and within a medical setting.
Problem statement
“As a therapist, I want to set measurable goals that engage my client in order to visualize their behavioral progress”.
After gathering the data from user interviews and completing the competitive analysis, I asked myself 3 questions:
How might we incorporate care plans within our current flow of adding exercises?
How would they be measured?
How might we motivate the client to complete goals?
This informed my problem statement that I used to ground all my design decisions in.
Design
Version 1
My first iteration took the simplest approach. I kept the flow of adding exercises as it was but added a way to track a specific exercise over time. I also allowed the therapist to set a goal for how many times overall they wanted the client to complete it.
Though this gave the ability to track an exercise in order to make the goal of “completion”, it didn’t account for a long-term goal solution. For example, If my goal is to reduce sensory aversion, tracking the number of times a client plays with Playdough does not tell the user or in this case the therapist or caregiver, if the child reached that goal.
Design
Version 2
For my second iteration, some things I kept in mind were to make all the goals within the care plan SMART goals and to design a flow that would work for all types of therapists, whether it was Speech, Behavioral, etc.
I also incorporated tags in order to organize goals and facilitate the finding of them in the future. Once a goal was tagged, it would show up in the previous “Assign goal” screen.
I then incorporated the current flow of adding an exercise into my design and relabeled them as “Milestones” (short-term goals).
Under the analytics page, goal tracking would still track the number of completed exercises but the cards would show the end date of the long-term goal. This way the therapists could get a quick snapshot of the client’s progress in relation to the long-term goal and reassess if needed.
Usability testing
The first version of PAL was released on the app store May of 2021 . As this flow is for the second release, it is still in the usability test stage as of 2021*
*As of 2022 PAL is no longer in production and as of 2024, is no longer available in the app store
Learnings
Since PAL is a new app, there is not an established design system.
I learned just how important a design system is to add consistency and standardization to designs since work is distributed in a way that causes us designers to work in a silo.
The next goal was to start a design system for PAL to try and mitigate the challenges that come from a distributed team, designing independently, and combining flows.