4.1.2017–4.2.2017: Concept, Scenario, Persona

Manjari, Minrui, and I convened to begin narrowing down out concept — where we decide to focus on the beginning stages of asthma, or what we decided to call, onboarding asthma. First, we sat down and spent some time brainstorming touchpoints and rough conceptual ideas. After sticking our notes onto the board, we categorized our thoughts and found these categories:

• Practical information: understanding environmental triggers, diagnosis, asthma knowledge, and tracking activity, followups
• Emotional support and communities.

We discussed a few of our ideas: going from physical care packages, community workshops, to digital dashboards. But how do we make sure that this will help a newly-diagnosed child and her family?

Diving deeper, we focused a little more on our concepts.

It looked like we were mostly interested in the idea of the following:

• having kid-friendly activities (diaries, stickers, care packages)
• games (e-pets that monitor your data, earning badges after passing milestones)
• direct interaction between children and doctors
• communication between parents, communication between asthmatic children (pen pals, group activities)

After further discussion, we realized the value of empowering children by allowing them to speak directly with pediatricians, who would potentially interpret their messages differently from how parents may do so.

Also, although children in this decade are fairly adept with technology, many don’t have access to smartphones until they are ten.

Here’s what we decided on combining:

• the doctor/child communication (via a physical, weekly log) with stickers
• pen pal communication between asthmatic children
• doctor/parent communication through digital portal, interpreting child’s postcards/stickers.

To help ourselves out, we drafted our personas: introducing Alice, her mother Vivian, and Marco, her pen pal.

Our final scenario:

After seven-year old Alice took a trip to the ER due to her first asthma attack, her parents are adjusting to accept their daughter’s condition. Worried about a more dire scenario where Alice would have no one to help, they are trying to learn more about asthma as possible. Becoming helicopter parents seems like the easiest option, but Alice has always came off as independent, so they are completely unsure of how to monitor her thresholds. Meanwhile, Alice is a little shaken, but she knows she can carefully perform some activities, being a relatively athletic child. However, she doesn’t know her limits yet, and wants to figure it out soon.

Her pediatrician gives her a small packet with tearable postcards, stickers, and empty envelopes and stationery. He tells her that she will be assigned a friend who is also relatively new to asthma as well, whom she is able to write letters to every week, while the parents are connected with the pen pal’s. Alice is also told to send him a weekly postcard via the school nurse where she fills out the places she were in with stickers, the activities she did, and how she felt during each one. The doctor would receive these postcards and is able to update and document her experiences weekly onto a digital portal, which can be accessed by the parents. Alice and her parents now feel less alone about their situation, and Alice, although wary, is ready to learn about her condition through trial and error.

A storyboard to go along with our scenario