Arque

Problem Space

Anxiety affects 1 in 8 children. Research shows that untreated children with anxiety disorders are at a higher risk to perform poorly in school, miss out on important social experiences, and engage in substance abuse. Because anxiety that goes untreated usually continues into adulthood, we thought it was important to try to address the issue of anxiety as early as possible.

Goal

The original goal was to develop a solution to help children cope with and deal with anxiety, but after doing our research, we found that there are already effective solutions out there. We discovered a different problem, which was that parents had trouble finding information about treatment. Our new goal became to design a solution to increase access to information about anxiety treatment for children.

Research

Interviews

We interviewed different medical professionals on the different types of treatment and about their knowledge of how accessible these treatments are. Some key takeaways were:

“Parental education and awareness of symptom recognition are important aspects of treatment.”

- Daisy Chow, Therapist

“Parents should not only be engaged but also supported in the treatment of their child.”

- Ashley Sedlacek, Practicum student

"Communication between parents and their children are extremely important"

- Bev Garreson, Pediatrician's Assistant

Surveys

We sent out a survey to parents with children dealing with anxiety to ask them about what they’re doing about treating their children and what difficulties they faced when trying to access treatment. We found 3 major insights:

• A majority of the parents were not offered resources for anxiety through teachers or family doctors and had to seek out information on their own
• Many parents who did try to find resources struggled in finding reliable or effective sources
• Many parents feel they don't have adequate resources to help their child

Design Sketches & Ideas

First, we gathered all of our major insights from our research and tried to organize them to create our design principles.

Using our principles, we brainstorm possible solutions that would make information about treatment more accessible to parents.

Paper Prototype

We started with low fidelity paper prototypes to figure out how we wanted our basic layout to look. We did some quick usability testing where we had a few participants try to search for treatment based on their child's symptoms. We learned that users wanted a little more guidance than just a search bar with filters on the side, so we decided to create a more in-depth process for searching for resources in our digital prototype.

Digital Prototype

For our digital prototype, we used Figma to create our screens. We took in some of the suggestions from testing our paper prototypes by trying to offer more guidance when looking for resources.

Usability Testing

We conducted 5 usability tests on our digital prototype to determine the effectiveness of our site in giving users helpful resources. For our participants who didn’t have children with anxiety, we created personas for them and their children so that they could attempt to select the appropriate resources.

Takeaways

• Our prototype focused a lot on finding resources. There was no reason to continue using the site once users found what they needed. We focused on fleshing out the social aspects of the site more by creating social progress bars and discussion pages.
• Parents wanted to see the progress of other parents and what was working We decided to create a feature to share progress. I designed the progress tracking feature that allows user to share goals for their child and what has been working for achieving each goal.

Reflection

We also had some features that we didn’t have time to implement within our timeframe. We are planning to continue working on our project for the next quarter and would like to implement therapist profiles, tools specific for child anxiety and not just general anxiety, and improving privacy settings.