Melodic
2022 Microsoft Imagine Cup World Championship
Taking prelingual deaf children as the target users, we provide a comprehensive option for target families to receive speech therapy fully-remote.
- Discover and define our project landscape
- Lead user research: desktop research, expert interviews, and userability tests
- Lead UX/UI design for web applications
Project Overview
My Role
Design
Challenge
Hearing-impaired Children Have A Large Base
Every day, nearly 2,000 newborns with hearing impairment in the world. A total of 34 million children need speech rehabilitation training. However, 80% of them can improve significantly after speech therapy.
High-cost Speech Therapy Fee
In US, traditional speech rehabilitation training costs nearly $1,000 per month. The period of speech rehabilitation training is generally in years, which is a high cost for ordinary families.
Limited Medical Resources And Access
Traditional speech therapy need meet with pathologists regularly. Consultation format and the outbreak of COVID-19 result in the shortage of speech therapy care.
Deliverables
Me as a UX design lead, scheme the user research plan to narrow down our project landscape at the beginning.
Come up with our design strategy to close the gap resulted from diagnosis of user experience, market and technology.
Design and prototype three web applications for all stakeholders.
Thinking
Process
Start to solve a vague and broad problem, I decided to start from analyzing our target user -- hearing impaired children. This group of children is complicated as well due to factors resulted in hearing loss, ages and learning time.
However, there is a question suddenly come to my mind: Are these children having commons? For themselves, how about their procedure of speech therapy. For environment, are there any other stakeholders serving as a positive catalyst?
By figuring out features of the target users and other stakeholders, I dived into the user research process to understand their individual user journey and how they connect.
Desktop
Research
20+
Speech Therapy and Hearing Impairment Related Internet Articles.
10+
Medical Papers from Google Research.
Key Insight #1
Reasons for limited medical resources:
1. Small number of pathologists and one-to-one consultation therapy format
2. Parents have no spare time to take children for regular consultations
Key Insight #2
Children with hearing impairments will rely on visual and tactile to learn speaking. Visualization and tactility integrated with emerging technology are potential features for our final solution.
Key Insight #3
Parents are eager to understand the whole process of speech therapy and track their children's performance timely.
Expert
Interview
I facilitated an expert interview. We analyzed and generated insights of children's mental model and behaviors.
Key Insight #4
Children feel bored with the therapy because they could not understand the importance of daily practice. Providing gamified separate activities will keep children interested in the training process.
Competitive
Analysis
The Users
Target Users
We decided to focus on providing prelingual deaf children with our solution as there're more commons in their training process.
Persona
We created three types of user persona based on our target user group and extended stakeholders.
Design
Strategy
Where are we today?
I discovered there're existing tele-therapy services, such as mobile applications, at separate user journey stages for different stakeholders. Moreover, families tend to ask help from local medical center at the first time that they need consultations. They will ignore medical services online.
Where do we want to be?
Target Opportunities: For target families, build an integrated system combining online and onsite services in order to make medical resources more accessible. For pathologists, providing features to help them give professional feedbacks timely is a necessity.
Vision & Principles: Customize user interface for three types of our users to indicate our professionals.
To-Be Journeys: Target families can choose to receive whole professional speech therapy fully-remote or hybrid. Comparing with the traditional therapy care, we offer a low-cost and more convenient option.
How will we get there?
We need three different applications to customized three types of user needs. On top of that, define connections among them and design a comprehensive service map by collecting, transmitting and analyzing data from different applications.
Proposed Solution
Service Design: System Map
✔️ Key Insight #1: Reasons for limited medical resources:
1. Small number of pathologists and one-to-one consultation therapy format
2. Parents have no spare time to take children for regular consultations
For Parents: Performance Tracking Application
✔️ Key Insight #3: Parents are eager to understand the whole process of speech therapy and track their children's performance timely.
For Pathologists: Patients Management Application
✔️ Key Insight #1: Small number of pathologists and one-to-one consultation therapy format.
For Children: Tele-therapy Training Application (Hardware Support)
✔️ Key Insight #1: Visualization and tactility integrated with emerging technology are potential features for our final solution.
✔️ Key Insight #4: Providing gamified separate activities will keep children interested in the training process.
Key Feature #1: Three Training Activities
Breath Training
Mouth Training
Speech Training
Key Feature #2: Gamification
Design
Validation
By reviewing every stage in this project, we still need certification to prove our professionals as we're designing medical device. However, we need to verify our design concept first and collect more real users‘ data which is a long-term plan for us.
Usability Test for Design Concept
Observation Questions
P1
P2
Could users understand instructions for the sound training?
❌
✅
Could users keep attention during the sound training?
✅
✅
Could users follow the sound training activities?
✅
✅
Could users understand instructions for the mouth training?
✅
✅
Could users keep attention during the mouth training?
✅
✅
Could users follow the mouth training activities?
✅
✅
Could users understand instructions for the breath training?
❌
✅
Could users keep attention during the breath training?
✅
✅
Could users follow the breath training?
✅
✅
How satisfied are the users after they have seen the visualized results?
😆
😬
Key Findings
Testing results for children always surprise me. One of our volunteers is 4 and the other one is 12.
1. We need to design more game formats to adapt different ages' interests.
2. Our web app needs to give some instruction to let parents accompany their kids when children break through higher levels. Because of the complexity of the higher-level training activities, the instructions might be not intuitive enough for children.
