Goally

Overview

Goally was a part of the 2018 Boulder Techstars graduating class and offers software-driven, behavior therapy to help kids with cognitive challenges like ADHD and Autism. Goally’s mission is to keep children on track during their daily routines which in turn lowers the stress and burden on parents. Goally provides families with a support product that provides everything from scheduled daily routines and a reward system to coaching services. The Goally application is housed on a child friendly, locked down android device with only the Goally application on it.

Problem Definition

When I joined the team, the existing Goally app had been designed by the engineers at Goally. The app needed an overhaul of the experience and interface to be more user friendly for children. My role was to create a product that is a fun and easy to use Android application for a wide range of children with cognitive challenges including ADHD and Autism.

Audience

Our primary audience is families with children that have cognitive learning challenges including but not limited to ADHD and Autism ranging from ages 5-18.

Team

I worked closely with a small team comprised of Engineers and a Behavioral Technician. The parents and children that were involved in the testing of Goally are people that I also consider a part of the team. I was the sole designer and was relied upon to be the driving force for the branding and user experience. Additionally, because I was working within Techstars at the time, I had mentors and other designers from other companies to bounce ideas off of and get feedback from.

Constraints

Because we were working to help children with different levels of cognitive challenges, we needed to be mindful of what would be an ideal experience for them and give parents the ability to change aspects of the app depending on their child’s needs. We also had quite a tight deadline of a month to re-design, develop, and test the app.

Design Process

I was given full design rights for the overhaul of the Goally App. First, I asked a lot of questions about the children that I would be designing for, gathering as much information as I could and drawing upon the experience I had designing for children at the Denver Public Library. I also did competitive research to see the other apps made for children and any apps in the genre of tasks, routines and time management.

Following my research, I started by drawing some sketches of what I thought the flow of the new Goally app should be. Then I continued on to wireframes for the screens. Once basic wireframes were complete, I put them into a prototyping program called Marvel App. With the app, I was able to create a functioning prototype. The prototype was reviewed by the team and the overall flow and design was agreed upon. As I started working on the aesthetics of the app, I had an idea for a friendly anthropomorphic button buddy that would help the child focus with friendly phrases and gestures with it’s arms and face. This was the basis for the rest of the design of the app, because I knew that having something fun and interactive was an important feature for children. If the app isn't fun, routines wouldn’t get done.

After finishing up high fidelity designs for the screens, I created a prototype on InVision to show to the team as well as the Techstars mentors for review. We had a handful of parents beta test the app with their children before the app was launched and those parents communicated there feedback with us by way of video. We utilized this feedback to make quick improvements to the prototype and finally the app along with the device was officially launched.

Retrospective

With the due date behind us, it would have been nice to have some more time for the product development and testing, but sometimes you have to hit the ground running and work with what you have. If I had more time I would have liked to watch more parents and children interact with the app in their own environment to see what it’s really like for them on an average day. Luckily, I am still working with Goally to improve the product based on parent and child feedback.