Step * Step

"Step by Step" is a mobile app that developed for kids with autism to do social skills training and exercises by a interactive digital experience.

DURATION
Designed in March - June 2019
Iterated in January - March 2020

TEAM
Brent Chase (CEO at Gaia)

DELIVERABLES
Redlines on Zeplin
Icons and Illustrations

Gaia is a biomedical tech startup that focuses on providing better daily experience to Autism Spectrum Disorder Community, by creating wearable smart apparel and app systems.

This suite has a mobile app and a apple watch app for kids, a mobile app for parents, a web portal for secondary caregivers.

Design Problems

Social Story Training is less effective than caregiver's expectation because of the unstandardized and manual training process.

The current methods are paper cards or poorly-designed mobile apps that are inconvenient for training on an hourly base, not durable to use, and not easy to be updated.

Design Outcome

"A more effective and efficient social skills building solution for kids with autism."

Step by step is a mobile app for Autism Social Story Training to practice autistic kid’s communication skills based on the activities caregivers pre-set and standardized exercises.

To-do List

Quick entry point for current on-going or up-coming activity

Abstract picture-based sub-activities

Activities and sub-activities based on kid's calendar created by caregivers.

Complete sub-activity by tapping the card

Points based reward system

Let kids easily know how well they are going
Numbers are easy to recognize and compare

Gaia is building a digital service for Social Story Training to bridge the communication gap easier and get rid of the guesswork and paperwork while practicing. 

My Role

I have been working on digital solutions for Autism Spectrum Disorder Community at Gaia since Dec 2018 as Product and Design Lead.

1. Researched current social story training solutions
2. Designed a mobile app for kids with autism to provide standardized training
3. Designed a web portal for families and caregivers to create and arrange training plan

Process

Visual System

Final Solution

Challenges

1. Define the core value and strategy
The inital mobile app users were kids and caregivers. But after testing and redefining the core value of our solution, we decided to separate the caregiver's functions to a web portal. Thus kids could be more independent and immersive to complete activities by themselves, and a web portal also supports better our strategic plan of connecting professional therapists and local caregivers.

2. Test and define visual and motion style with ASD kids
Testing with and getting feedback from children with autism were tough since they are sensitive, have a lower ability to self-report. Thus our first consideration of defining UI style was based on medical research of using abstract pictures. And the motion design was also developed based on principles like swift, lively, and responsive.