Treating Anxiety in Children

TREATING ANXIETY IN CHILDREN

What are the struggles that children with anxiety & their families face?

How effective are existing solutions and therapies?

How might we design a digital treatment to help kids who aren't able to get the care that they need?

IN BRIEF

A healthcare tech startup wanted to design a digital treatment for anxiety in children that kids actually want to use.

MY ROLE IN THE PROJECT

As User Research Lead, I worked closely with the Design Lead and a Product Manager to develop insights for product design -- conducting both generative and evaluative resarch.

PROCESS & METHODS

Understanding the families

What do kids and families need? What are the problems? How are they managing today?

Through a mix of diary studies, in-home interviews, and remote interviews, we learned about how families deal with childhood anxiety.

We created personas, mapped out a user journey to getting cognitive behavioral therapy, and identified opportunities for a digital treatment.

Exploring possible solutions

Do the designs address the needs? Are the designs intuitive and easy-to-use?

Through low-fidelity prototyping, we conducted iterative concept testing to create a digital experience that effectively guides kids & parents through the steps of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) - and, specifically, exposure therapy - on their own.

Observing the product in action

Now that we've built a product, does it actually work? How do we improve it?

We conducted UX research in parallel with clinical trials. While research psychiatrists measured patients' anxiety levels as they used the product over time, I interviewed patient families to learn more about their specific experiences with the digital treatment.

SOME KEY LEARNINGS

There aren't enough therapists to help kids. And even when families are able to find one, many kids give up & drop out.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is about learning new skills, and a lot can get in the way of that education (e.g., the patient-therapist relationship, the therapist's ability to teach, etc).

How do keep kids engaged?

Digital treatments address the digital shortage & animated stories engage kids.

I tested animatics (video drafts) with kids to assess engagement through multiple 1-1 in-person interviews every two weeks as video content was being created.

The tool's the thing.

Families conceptualize therapy as a way to learn "tools" or "skills" that help them deal with anxiety when it happens.

Kids want to feel "less bad."

Parents want to learn how to respond to an anxious child in-the-moment.

How do we structure the digital content to best highlight the most important lessons?

Our team created short animated stories & specific training guides - all with the goal of teaching tools that help families tackle anxiety in-the-moment.

These practice sessions are available in the "Toolbox."

As kids watch each animated story, a new "tool" becomes available for them to learn.

deep breathing practice guide

Exposure therapy is hard, even with a therapist to guide families through it.

The user journey for CBT is filled with pain points & families have dropped out for a multiplicity of reasons.

We went through three rounds of paper prototype testing to create a UI that addresses those pain points - and ensure families are able to implement exposures, or "missions," on their own.

Given how quickly we learned & how quickly paper prototyping allowed us to iterate on designs, we were able to land on a UI that really held the patient's hand through the process of creating & implementing exposures.

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