In a team of several people, as part of an unpaid project, we decided to create a redesign of the Hello Earth game, which had been created a few years earlier at NCU.
According to the division of responsibilities in the team, I was responsible for UX design tasks. In the beginning, my main goal was to create a persona. This was a key step for further design decisions - both in terms of the functionality of the application and its visual side.
After watching and reading numerous interviews and documentaries with parents and children/teenagers with ASD, I created a persona that was consulted and approved by therapists who work with children/teenagers on the autism spectrum daily.
Story
Tomek is 14 years old and goes to school in Bydgoszcz. He attends therapy twice a week. He has many interests. As a child, he loved to draw. He drew practically everything, however, he did not like to draw himself. When asked by therapists why he replied that he didn't like himself and wasn't interested. His interests changed as he grew older, and he is now most absorbed in the history of the Balkan countries. Unfortunately, the lack of self-confidence has remained. Tomek often understates his abilities and does not see his strengths. He likes predictability and orderly life, he feels safer then.
He knows that he has specific tastes in food. He finds it difficult to get dressed quickly and to work quickly at all, because he is easily distracted.
He does not feel comfortable around peers, often feels misunderstood, and suffers from loneliness. He has touched on this subject many times in therapy but realizes that there is still a lot of work ahead of him. He doesn't like to catch eye contact, touch paralyzes him, and loud noises are unbearable, and this doesn't make it easy to meet people as a teenager. He dreams very much of having a friend but doesn't know how he is supposed to get one. It bothers him that he has difficulty recognizing other people's emotions and expectations. Because of this, he feels that his behavior is misguided.
He finds some solace in in-game chats. They give him time to think about his answers and are not as stressful as live conversations. He has a group of people on Discord whom he doesn't know personally, but he likes to play a few games with them, and by and large, they are his closest peers. The person closest to him is his sister.
Tomek loves his family very much and often worries about what will happen if they die. He knows that his parents love him very much, but sometimes he feels overwhelmed by their overprotectiveness. He would like to be more independent, especially since he dreams of studying in another city. The world of science absorbs him and gives him the sense of security he lacks in his relationship with his peers.
Goals
Wants
Fears
Needs
The next important step after creating the persona was to develop the Customer Journey. Below are the two issues that I found to be the most important and I isolated them during the development of this tool. Through their prism we should once again think about the proposed functionalities of the application.
Food selectivity
Food selectivity is a common nutritional problem in people on the autism spectrum. It involves a preference for certain, often very limited, foods and a rejection of others.
Together, we determined that the user would complete a questionnaire about their food preferences after logging into the app.
Based on the Customer Journey I prepared, I proposed that the user should be able to modify the list of excluded foods at each stage of using the app.
Avoid metaphorical language
People with autism spectrum disorders may have difficulty understanding metaphorical language, preferring concrete and literal interpretations of words. They may need more direct and straightforward instructions and directions to understand what is required of them.
During the development of Customer Journey, I noticed that cooking is an area where we often use metaphors to describe various processes and activities involved in food preparation, e.g. "simmer on low heat," "fry until golden brown."
I suggested to the group that such expressions and phrases should be avoided already at the stage of inventing the tasks and functionality of the app.
The tasks I prepared influenced the creation of a common vision for the project. First of all, I think that thanks to the persona, in the team, we avoided infantilizing future users of the application.
In addition to the shuffle I cited above, during the project I was also responsible for benchmarking applications to assist people with ASD, co-developing the list of application functionalities, creating the task list, and organizing the group's work.
Unfortunately, the Hello Earth 2.0 project has been put on hold. Nonetheless, I wanted to talk about my role in it, because this is where I first faced the task of looking at the world through the eyes of a non-neurotypical person. This experience contributed immensely to my interest in the topic of creating products to support therapy.
I'd love to talk about the rest. 😊