Autism-focused Community Platform
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Role
Founding Designer and Co-founder (2020-2022)
Goal
Build a community platform that increases collaborative care between therapists and families of children with Autism.
Impact (As of November 2022)
197 active users (on a monthly basis)
9,800+ community board views
1,400+ media posts uploaded in total
3 onboarded centers (Each center has 30-200 kids)
Table of Contents
Problem Statement
Autistic child care involves large care teams tailored to each child’s needs, including: 68% of parents are unfamiliar with their child's daily therapists, and collaboration issues among professionals lead to inefficiencies and inadequate family support. A child can have 1:1 support between 3-6 therapists who are responsible for carrying out their behavioral goals, education and life skills. This doesn’t include their special education teachers, speech therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, music therapists, etc. Special education schools and autism-focused therapy centers are the second most important environments for autistic children (the first being their homes), yet there is often a lack of awareness of a child’s daily activities. I explored several “How Might We” (HMW) Questions to identify that a common theme among the problems are “How might we build a community that increases collaborative care between therapists and families of children with Autism?.”
The HMW exercise narrowed down a clear objective that fulfills the critical problems that needs to be addressed for the research to be performed. It became clear that the success of a child’s care entirely dependent on the communication between the care team.
Research & Discovery Process
Personal Motivation
Why did I start Platybase? Growing up with a neurodivergent family member, I understood the struggle and the need to be seen and supported appropriately. Before my brother was diagnosed with autism, nobody noticed he was behind his peers in social and emotional development, because they saw he was academically advanced. I gradually met other women sharing this frustration with miscommunication and visibility; we felt that there was an opportunity to solve this problem together and set out to found a company to fulfill this mission.
Competitive Analysis
Being the sole designer for this startup, I had to think about the product-market fit and the business’ financial objectives without compromising the quality of care, while iterating to move closer to a solution (and not finding an immediate solution first). There were multiple existing portals that addressed the productivity of delivering care that includes behavioral data collection and billing, but none addressed the collaboration of care. Moreover, the portal UI itself are not designed with intent where features are outdated to today’s standards or don’t pass the standard UX heuristic.
The founders of these portals are typically health professionals with no engineering backgrounds which explains the lack of technical detail on the interface.
Research Methodology
Solutioning for an Autism-related product was a complex process necessitating a strong foundation on research and an iterative cycle of “Question” and “Test” for each step in order to advocate for the user in my process.
Assumption Mapping
Preliminary research was conducted to understand the most critical problems to alleviate in our solution. I mapped out posts from multiple Autism support Facebook groups that expressed frustrations in the Autism care system by popularity/frequency, assumptions to test, and difficulty to test. I decided to use facebook because it was the preferred platform for families when asking for support and advice on Autism. I picked posts that were in the last week, had the most engagement, and that come from personal experiences of parents, therapists, and individuals with Autism. Some of the facebook groups that had 5-10K posts that I joined were “Autism support group Maryland,” “A REAL Autism Support Group For Teens, Adults, & Parents,” and “ABA Therapists, Respite, Nannies & Parents Connections. ”(Note: Pain points on Facebook are anecdotal and are not fully inclusive of the Autistic experience. How can non-neurodivergent family members understand how to care for their autistic loved ones?) Using this method, I found the most popular and simplest to resolve pain points: experiences to increase confidence, to celebrate, and to recognize the value of care team members.
This exercise highlighted quadrant 1 and 2: one focusing on enhancing children's self-esteem, facilitating parental gratitude towards caregivers, and addressing lifestyle-related self-esteem issues; and another centered on providing specific advice for children's circumstances, supporting autism advocacy, and fostering connections among families affected by autism.
Quadrant 1’s posts appealed to me as a potential phase 1 to explore because the other problems are addressed in facebook by connecting with others. While yes this process can be improved, I would rather add that as a feature in a later phase to create an ultimate care team ecosystem that prioritizes the people from child to therapists first.
14-month Field Study: Behavioral Therapy
How are children’s progress currently being measured or tracked? To collect primary research data through a professional lens, I felt the most empathetic course of action for a designer is to work at a special education school as a therapist. I wanted to be in a space that had a diversity of experiences from the care team and children that I can validate from the facebook posts earlier. After working one year, I learned the day-to-day routine of a therapist providing care for children with autism.
I wrote qualitative entries of my experiences for 14 months. I remember how inefficient the data entry and data analysis process is. We had to tediously enter data into excel after the children left school. It was already difficult enough to collect data at the moment while taking care of the child. As the primary therapists we don’t analyze the data so it doesn’t mean anything to us when we track it. Sometimes it would take months to a year to see any progress that would be meaningful to the child. The parents only see a piece of paper with data at the end of the day to even know what happened during their child’s day.
I was already emotionally drained every day, but the days that were the worst were having to go to the urgent care center after being injured like the day I was bit multiple times on the arms despite wearing protective gear. The only thing that kept motivating me to come back is to see the children succeeding and happy.
Entries from my diary
“I had a caseload of 18 children by 3 months. We were tirelessly overworked where we had 15-minute lunches at one point because of lack of staff availability due to high turnover.”
“I got to understand that parents know little of what actually happens throughout the day (Most kids are non-verbal too).”
“Some behaviors are difficult to enforce at home due to the lack of documented guidance (Communications are done via texting).”
Therapists are motivated by the progress they see of the child, not the quantitative value they track. It’s important to be reminded of previous achievements to keep morale up. Additionally, families need to be informed of what the child is learning and succeed in a meaningful way that’s not just numbers.
Service Design Blueprint: Therapists and Patients
I organized my experiences as a behavioral therapist systematically in a service design blueprint to discover the moments that matter (which defines as improving care for a child). Are these experiences the same for other centers? I listed the steps involved, actions the therapist performs, the observable experiences of a child, and the resources and personnel necessary to complete tasks.
I decided to organize my notes into a blueprint to help visualize my full day when I’m communicating to my team insights that were from my experiences as a behavioral therapist. There's a strong focus on individualized support, with the therapist constantly adapting to the child's needs and behaviors. Communication and coordination among staff, as well as with parents, are crucial and challenging aspects of the job. There are a lot of competing priorities when you’re with the child at the moment: data collection, getting fed, getting dressed, providing reinforcement, helping with the bathroom, and many others.
Maintaining accessibility to key priorities are non-negotiable. Key priorities are also undocumented opportunities to share that are limited by the privacy restrictions to texting.
Artifact: DTT
At the end of the day, the therapists were required to enter data on this data sheet by hand for every child. This was critical to document to understand that the baseline for metrics to measure children’s behavioral performance is recorded as data points.
All of the children have a complex schedule that rotates with at least 3-10 caregivers on a daily basis to meet their individual needs. Every child required a DTT (Discrete Trial Teaching) session that provided a structured and bite-sized approach to learning compared to neurotypical learning environments. It’s performed in a 1:1 context with a therapist and child where skills are broken down into small, manageable steps and taught one at a time through repeated practice, with immediate positive reinforcement given for correct responses. The downside with this approach is that it limits the child’s efforts into numbers and often forgetting the qualitative wins when doing analysis into behavioral intervention.
There is a lot of behavioral data documented numerically, but none qualitatively shared to families.
This experience taught me the nuances of this environment from a child-centric lens, the frustrations of a parent, and the operational nature of an Autism service provider. In my time there, I was beginning to understand when would be the right time to document behavior. Sometimes it’s beyond just quantifying that proves success for a child.
Target Audience
At this point, I had a clear understanding who my audience is for a potential product. To reduce the amount of burden families have for care, I decided to sell the product to centers themselves. This way, care team members can focus on quality of care and to alleviate the burden from families. The users of the products are parents or families and care team members that will communicate with one another the details of the child which engagement is a metric for effective communication between all of them. Finally, all of these experiences revolve around the care of the child.
Who am I selling the product to?
Who will use the app?
Who will receive care?
Special Education schools/Autism Centers that practice ABA Therapy
Behavioral therapists, parents, and other care team members
Children of Autism
What is ABA Therapy? Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is a research-based behavioral therapy that focuses on understanding and improving behaviors through positive reinforcement techniques. ABA breaks down complex skills into small, manageable steps and rewards positive behaviors while reducing challenging ones. The therapy is highly personalized, with treatment plans tailored to each individual's specific needs, abilities, and challenges. ABA therapy helps develop several key areas: Communication and language abilities, Social interaction skills, Self-care and daily living skills, Motor abilities, and Pre-academic skills
Additional Stakeholder Interviews
I conducted 28 interviews from clinical supervisors, therapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, special education teachers, guardians, and adult individuals with autism. To best consolidate our findings I hosted a team workshop to organize themes from our conversations and experiences.
“I didn’t realize that we couldn’t record videos. Two of my clients recently learned how to fold socks. It would have been really cool to show the parents how we’re teaching them”
Key Themes
Passion for ABA therapy: Interviewees expressed a strong passion for behavioral therapy and helping children with autism progress.
Importance of visual progress tracking: The ability to share photos and videos of children's achievements was highly valued for communicating with parents and tracking progress over time.
Desire for improved communication: Both interviewees emphasized the importance of better communication between therapists, parents, and team members.
Appreciation for small achievements: Therapists find fulfillment in helping children master everyday tasks, which significantly improves the child's independence and quality of life.
Need for consistency across environments: Consistency in therapy approaches between home and school is crucial for the child's progress and skill generalization.
Adaptation to COVID-19 challenges: The pandemic has forced ABA centers to adapt their services, including the use of telehealth options.
User Flow
The user flow visually represents the basic workflow and primary use of the app. This will guide how the screens and interactions of the application should flow for each different user. The most important feature is the ability to exchange photos and videos in one shared feed by the family member or therapist. The interactions that define success in engagement are by a comment or like.
The moderator access are the parents who will create the care team groups for the child. While therapists will populate most of the content to enforce behavioral progress during the day and inform parents what their children are doing since they had no visibility before.
It’s important not to overcomplicate the features if we are trying to increase adoption for the first release. Taking a photo, video, and writing a message are already a common pattern that we can expect people to understand quickly.
Usability
I conducted a moderated usability study with questions that not only validated the workflow, but explored potential alternate use cases for the core feature set. The usability was conducted on therapists I worked with at the center since it was convenient at the time to get immediate feedback. The way I structured the questions was first by asking about their educational background, then experience at the center, then I asked specific tasks from the user flow, then followed up with additional questions to expand on the potential task flow.
The usability revealed key insights about therapists' experiences, challenges, and needs in providing ABA Therapy and documenting child progress. Therapists are united in their commitment to supporting child development and transforming families' lives through ABA Therapy, while acknowledging that progress varies significantly for each child. The social connection between team members proves crucial for staff retention and continuity of care. While the platform's tasks were found to be intuitive and quick to complete, taking less than a minute on average, therapists expressed concerns about managing multiple children's accounts and maintaining privacy when sharing media. They highlighted diverse milestone categories worth celebrating, including communication, self-care, social interaction, motor skills, and pre-academic achievements. Some challenges identified include potential slow adoption by less tech-savvy parents, inconsistent documentation due to competing priorities during care, and privacy concerns regarding photo and video sharing.
Total number of Therapists: 3
Background Questions
How did you get started into ABA Therapy?
What motivates you to continue providing ABA Therapy?
Was there a point you wanted to quit? What motivated you to keep going?
How do you feel about a social platform as a solution to the problems you face?
How do you currently communicate to parents?
Workflow Questions
How would you make an account?
What is the level of difficulty on this action?
How would you onboard families with the app?
What kind of onboarding challenges would you face with therapists and families?
How would you make a post for a child?
What is the level of difficulty on this action?
What type of posts would you share?
How would you respond to a parent?
What is the level of difficulty on this action?
What is the level of convenience to communicate on the platform?
How would you manage care team members?
What is the level of difficulty on this action?
How often would you have to delete team members?
These findings suggest that future features should focus on foolproof account switching mechanisms, robust privacy controls, streamlined documentation workflows, and intuitive interfaces that accommodate users with varying levels of technological proficiency. Given the high turnover rates in behavioral health settings, the platform must include administrative capabilities to efficiently manage and remove therapist accounts when staff changes occur. The initial rollout should concentrate on core developmental milestone categories: communication and language, self-care and life skills, social interaction, motor skills, and pre-academic skills, allowing for focused and meaningful progress tracking. Most importantly, the platform should embrace a positive reinforcement approach, celebrating every achievement, no matter how small, as each step represents meaningful progress in a child's developmental journey.
Define Design Goals: Affinity Map
Comprehensive research, including a 14-month field study and 28 stakeholder interviews, revealed critical insights into the autism care ecosystem. Parents were unfamiliar with their child's daily therapists and the moments of their day, highlighting a significant communication gap. Therapists spent most of their day engaged in activities with children, leaving little time for detailed documentation. Parents expressed a strong desire to celebrate small achievements, not just numerical progress data. Additionally, current methods of tracking progress were often too clinical, focusing on data points rather than meaningful moments. These findings underscored the need for a solution that could bridge communication gaps, streamline documentation for busy therapists, and provide a more holistic, celebratory approach to tracking a child's development.
Primary design feature goals:
Improve communication between therapists and families by creating an easy-to-use platform for sharing daily updates and milestones.
Develop a quick and intuitive interface for therapists to document moments throughout their busy day without disrupting their work with children.
Allow for the celebration of small achievements and qualitative progress, moving beyond just numerical data.
Prototyping Process
My design approach for Platybase evolved from our extensive research, embracing an iterative, user-centered methodology. Through continuous collaboration with therapists, parents, and care centers, the focus shifted from merely facilitating communication to creating a platform that celebrates achievements, organizes behavioral progress, and fosters community. This evolution informed my prototyping strategy, whereby alternating between quick, functional prototypes and more polished designs, no-code platforms and high-fidelity mockups could be fully leveraged to validate the initial assumptions, to efficiently test core functionalities, and to gather user experience feedback.
Key Features
Tags to Organize Behavioral Progress
Tags are used to organize moments based on different goals of the child such as behavioral progress. The community board has the ability to filter the feed by the tags to compare past and present outcomes as a visual timeline. I decided to make pre-determined tags that are aligned with behavioral goals that are measured similarly to other children that can be attached by any user. Chat bubbles were more effective than modals in communicating as therapists were more accustomed to text messages. This solution provides a secure way to send information about children.
Quick Media Upload
Quick access for posting moments is designed to accommodate multiple priorities around the child’s care. Moments are captured in three simple interactions: comments, photos, and videos. These simple choices easily adapt to the therapist's current workflow with time to determine the correct child account to post.
Managing care team members and children
The enhanced account page pairs therapists with the correct children and care team members. My research revealed children’s care team members are not consistent due to high turnover of therapists. In addition, security is a large concern when it comes to having the correct child information in the app.
Visual Identity
The platypus, with its unique combination of features, resonates with our core message of celebrating neurodiversity. During our interviews, many parents expressed feeling isolated in a neurotypical world and wanted a symbol that embraced uniqueness. The platypus being a distinctive yet lovable animal, perfectly encapsulates this sentiment. An Aboriginal Australian dreaming story recognizes that the platypus chooses not to belong to the Bird Tribe, Fish Tribe, and Animal Tribe, but it chose to remain independent while maintaining friendships with all, teaching a lesson about the value of unity and acceptance of differences. It serves as a gentle reminder that being different is not just okay, but something to be celebrated.
Reflections
My role as a designer-founder involved wearing a lot of hats out of necessity to grow the business. My research validated the business closer to a product market-fit. Additionally, my role as a therapist proved to be advantageous for being able to provide immediate feedback to shape my design decisions.
Research is critical to discover the right problem to solve especially when it comes to serving the autistic community. We already know autism is “hard,” so I wondered “why” every step of my process for a hypothesis-driven approach to my empathetic research.
I understood that the complexity of care for autism can be approached by multiple angles, but the chosen approach should fit ease to adoption. I learned to prioritize what problems we can solve for now rather than later first. What families and providers care about the most is the success for their children.
Let’s solve tough problems together. Contact at pandaymika@gmail.com