Family outcomes, tracking
& parent training
My role
Product Thinking, design strategym UX/UI design, Prototyping & testing, managing
Duration
3 weeks (MVP)
4 months (v1.0)
Platform
iOS
Android
Team
2 Designers, 1 Product manager, 12 Clinical professionals, 2 Engineers and 4 Content writers
The opportunity
At Genial Care, we believe that every child can reach all of their full potential. When our clients were onboarding, they are challenged to answer the question “What is your big picture goal for your daughter/son?”.
Is very common for many families with autism diagnoses to follow the tradicional clinic path. First of all, for the parents, they don't know what to do since the beggining. They (i) even doesn't know or understand about autism, (ii) may have difficults with acceptance or (iii) emotional regulations about the disorder, (iv) struggling with social expectations, school and the (v) impact on everybody routines.
They may goes in a (vi) ABA - Applied Behavior Analysis Clinic, and then to meet some (vii) Speech Therapists, (viii) Neurologists or (ix) Occupational therapy - all of them at same time looking for a cure, struggling with overlap informations, a lot of paper and reports, and all the intervention and data are complete disconnected with the child direct therapy. So, We know that is really hard for parents and their children achieve a balance between quality of life, learn new skills for their disruptive behaviors or disorders.
Our mindset was to design a Parent Training that helps families to find the balance between life quality and child responses evolution
After the child assessment, our clinical coordinator set goals with families about what is expected for children evolution. All of this expectation will be connected with the PEI (Individualizes Educational Program) that guides clinical team with all child informations, habilities, skills expected, responses, to be analyzed in every directly clinical session. All of this clinical records and management you can see here.
In order to increase clinical outcomes effectively for parents and children, we had to define our own Parent Training and modality as a service. The decision was tTat we had to focused on (i) Knowledge-Based and (ii) Technique-based. Mixing together we knew clinically that will help families to achieve the balance between well beign and how to deal with autism condition.
We started with deep research, surveys and listenings, to understand user pain points and clinical tasks. There was a lot of data. And we decide to release gradual versions, like continuos product methodology.
Following below, you can see a journey draft that guides product trio, clinicians specialists in order to design all touchpoints between families and clinical team.
Designing tecnique based parent training
We started the journey with pushing families engagement mindset, because there was important for us to create in the beginning a real connection between clinical specialists and parents.
I trained 10 clinical coordinators (each one can handle 15 active cases) about how our parent training and the journey would works with all strategy, actions and guidelines. It was really important for clinical team understand what is expected of them and mainly put a concierge vision inside the service, how clinical specialist could engage parents to achieve their goals.
After that, each clinical designed by themselves a plan for each parent/child needs. We defined all clinical tasks for the first 3 months, in order to encourage parents and child in their development and evolution.
In resume, for a tecnique based approach, here is some clinical features that coordinators applied with parents: (i) acceptance, (ii) reception, (iii) emotional support, (iv) service presentation, (v) identifying demands, (vi) analising clinical data and parent responses, (vii) surveys applying, (viii) content deliberation, (ix) follow-ups and (x) monthly clinical reports.
Designing knowledge based parent training
After research and mapping parent needs, we created a content strategy and defined lesson plan that helps parents in their pain points about autism. The result was more than 120 articles and contents focused on daily challenges of the family like unfurl, sleeping, emotional regulation, routines, socialization, communication, how to deal with crises, etc.
I had to define a KPI tree and funnel — with input & output metrics mindset — to manage our content creation capacity, elegibility, disponibilization, consumption to measure and understand the impact on their lifes. I tracked and estimulated our content professionals to scale our capacity by week. This execution strategy was really important because we had to scale fast the total number of content in our library.
What we delivery
Design vision
Our mindset it was that we could create new habits for parents to understand faster as they can and convinced the value of tecnique skills and knowledge based on their autism journey.
Each day in a child life is very important, that is the reason to invest time teaching fundamentals and skills for a child. This skills could increase his habilities day by day and this can impact in a quality of they lives.
Provide clinical sessions and a app that teach 1% everyday was our decision. An hybrid model that encourage parents to go out of their comfort zone with our service and application.
Prototyping
We learned that families life is so struggling many times each day. It is not easy to deal with child crisis. Even that moment when a mom could be not prepared to achieve your own emotional regulation in crisis moment in each event is not a garantee.
So, we invested a lot in friendly user flow with great microcopies, illustrations and educational content. Our focus was to create and design a warmy feeling to users. Helping them to remember and feel great in a few minutes.
Validation
Actually it was not too hard validate our hipotesis. We learned that families were really needy of a autism full service that care of parents and child simultaneously. We shared ideas, content, user flows and the biggest part of time we heard something like “OMG, this is all what we need. Finally I have someone that I can trust, share, ask. My days it will become easier. We love you. I am happy that you could help other families like us."
We mixed Figma and Maze to usability tests with face cam recording and test report. It was great to share insights for product trio.
Clinical outcomes
We designed an friendly experience app that shows how parents could be more confident about autism journey as an opportunity to grow everyday. In addition to direct clinical sessions, parents could see all contents, watch movies, listen to audios, exercises and quizes.
Clinicals had to reinforce the importance of the knowledge and they made follow up in each 3 week. After 6 month cycle, we analyse all data and understand the family evolution applying a clinical protocol that calls HSQ (Home Situation Questionaire) to measure their data about each aspect of life and see results about (i) core skills (dressing, sleeping, rising, eating, walking, hygiene, activities) and (ii) disruptive behaviors.
Teaching core skills to autism families
Tracking progress and evolution
Beyond the library and content approach, each clinical session was executed by an therapist, and they record and write like a tweet how was the response of child for the parents and register the number of attempts and response in our platform. This experience works like a relief for parents that want to know how thing are going per skill, increasing deeply the understanding about child response and behavior that we are building together.
Furthermore, they could know the total number of hours and sessions, skills and child progress per session. That was the best way that we find to help parents to follow the our individualized teaching program for both: parents and child.
