Week 7 — Designing our touch points
This week we began wire framing and iterating on our final touch points.
We spent a fair amount of time working through the flows and interactions within the mobile application. We worked through a couple of iterations of how parents and children would enter symptom information into the app and various options for visualizing data. We ultimately decided to have the symptom data collection hosted exclusively within the daily journal feature, instead of breaking out a separate data entry feature for parents. Since frequency of symptoms is a key differentiator for physician’s asthma severity diagnosis criteria, we decided to focus our symptom and medication tracking on frequency of events, instead of trying to dig into levels of severity for each type of symptom. We also realized that data did not need to be tied to a particular time of day, but that bucketing symptoms into morning/afternoon/night provides enough granularity for a doctor to make a diagnostic judgement.
We also dug more into the “Breathing Buddy” feature, which is the part of the app that is used during an asthma attack. This feature mimics mediation or mindfulness apps and shows our bear character breathing in and out slowly to visualize for the child how to start controlling their breathing during an attack. For 4–6 year olds also often have to wear a mask to take their rescue medication, which can be a challenge. Given this, we decided to have the bear in the meditation visualization also wearing the mask to help normalize the feeling for the child.
Furthermore, we realized the Breathing Buddy feature offered an opportunity to address another challenge that doctor’s face in managing asthma in children — how to know whether the child is using the proper technique when taking their medication. Since a child will be watching the Breathing Buddy during an attack and when they are taking their inhaler, for example, the app can not only track the time and duration of the attack, but also video record the event (with a parent’s permission). With the video recording, a doctor can then review the episodes and make corrections to a patient’s inhaler technique, if needed.
The final feature of the app that we are building out is the Daily Journal, where children, with their parents, record what they did that day and the frequency of their asthma symptoms. In order to figure out how this feature should work, we did a few “body storming” exercises try to mimic the conversation between a parent and child using the app. Through this exercise we realized that if the parent was driving the conversation about symptoms, it may feel a bit like an interrogation for the child. So, we decided that the application, via the bear character, should be prompting the interaction and symptom questions.
Additionally, given the concept feedback we received in our interview last week, we worked through how to add a gamification or reward element to the Daily Journal. Children will earn stars for each time they take daily their daily preventative medicine and when they complete their nightly journal page. Progress will be tracked against weekly goals, and parents can establish treats or rewards for a child hitting their goal.
We also developed a concept and rough storyboards for our video. We are going to shoot the video from the perspective of child to demonstrate the experience in context. Since our concept is story-based, we are going to use the storybook that we wrote as the voice-over in the video to walk through the elements of our service.
Lastly, we established a name for our service — Breezely! Instead of a Grizzly Bear, we have Breezely the Bear, who helps you manage your asthma and breathe easily.
Next week we will focus on digitizing our paper prototypes, finalizing our video script, and shooting the video.
