STARSHIP: DIGITAL TEACHING AIDS FOR AUTISTIC CHILDREN
User research & UX/UI design 2017-2019
Starship is an app that supports autistic children's training of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) skills. It is used by parents and therapists to achieve consistent training and efficient communication, and enables therapists to quickly build personalized teaching aids for each individual case.
Group Project of 7: Chen Chou, Yi-Lin Zhuang, Li-Quan Qiu, Wei-Ru Chen, Jie-An Cai, Dong-Cheng Wu, Qiao-Yu Yang
Role: team leader, project manager, user researcher (including user testing), UX/UI designer (later stages)
CONTEXT
One of the challenges encountered by autistic children is the learning of basic self-care skills, such as putting on clothes and washing their hands, which often results in dependency on their parents. These skills are called Activities of Daily Living (ADL), and can be trained with the task analysis method. Therapists would use task analysis to break a skill down into single steps, depending on the condition of each individual child, and adjust the training materials according to the child's progress, which may change from time to time. Meanwhile, it is best for the children's development if they receive consistent training at home as well. Therefore, Starship aims to help maintain the training consistency of autistic children, by supporting the parents, the therapists, and the children through digital service.
PROCESS
The project followed the double diamond design process, and underwent several design iterations based on feedback from user tests. As the project team consists of students from different areas of expertise, including psychology, design, and engineering, the team went through many decision-makings regarding different aspects of the design as well. My main responsibilities include project managing, user research in all stages, and UX/UI design in the final stage. The qualitative user research involves interviews and user testings with therapists from hospitals and treatment centers and several parents of autistic children or young toddlers. The quantitative user research involves online questionnaires filled out by 74 parents from the Kindergarten-Primary School ASD Parents and Helpers Group.
ADL TRAINING FOR AUTISTIC CHILDREN
The following principles can help support autistic children's ADL development in combination with the task analysis training method:
Consistent learning: It is important for autistic children to be learn consistently, preferably using the same method or pattern, both in hospital/school (with therapists or teachers) and at home (with parents).
Individualized planning: Each autistic child's learning ability and speed differ from one another, and would encounter different obstacles. Therefore, individualized training plans are necessary.
Flexible adjustment: Autistic children's ability to complete a task may regress instead of progress, meaning that the training plan for the children needs to be flexible enough to adapt to their condition.
CURRENT PROBLEMS & PAIN POINTS
Parents: Consistent learning is difficult to achieve, as parents cannot achieve the same training results as hospitals or schools and meet the requirements of the therapist. They do not know the effective ADL training method, and can become frustrated as it is time- and energy-consuming. They also find it difficult to explain their child’s difficulties accurately and sometimes forgets them.
Therapists: Therapists cannot continuously observe or train the children, and need to rely on the parents to teach the children at home and to keep track of their progress and problems. However, they often feel pressured when there are too many patients but too limited time for consultation, during which they have to ask repetitively about the children’s condition and need to teach the parents how to train their children. They also spend much time making the teaching materials.
Children: The repetitive training process also tends to be boring and can cause tension between children and parents, since autistic children often have learning disabilities, and lack interest in learning and improving self-care skills. They can become emotionally unstable, especially when frustrated.
DIGITAL PLATFORM WITH TWO-WAY PROFILES
A digital platform is built to be accessed by both the therapist and the parents, through individual profiles of the children. The parents can access training instructions in their child’s account, and the therapist can access the account as well to adjust the instructions and look up the child’s progress.
PERSONALIZED TRAINING MATERIALS
The digital template is convenient for therapists to create training materials for individual children, including adding photos, videos, descriptions, and task steps, and to regularly adjust them and add tips regarding the children’s learning progress. Therapists can also share their materials with others to support the community, and big data can also be collected to generate and improve on templates for future therapists.
STRUCTURED AND GAMIFIED LEARNING
While the parents can follow the structured task analysis training process with materials made by the therapist specifically for their child, the child can also enjoy and engage more in the learning process, with the help of friendly characters and interesting storyline that offer both short-term and long-term rewards.
PROGRESS TRACKING
The progress and problems encountered by the child during ADL training can be recorded accurately with visuals and texts by the parents, in order to achieve faster and more effective communication with the therapist. The service can also visualize the progress of the child overtime for tracking and comparison.
