Survey of Wellbeing of Young Children (SWYC)—Mobile and Desktop Concepts for Parents

From September 2013 to May 2014, I worked with a research team from Tufts Medical screen to bring their new developmental screener, the Survey of Wellbeing of Young Children (SWYC) online. While the majority of my efforts focused on created the pediatrician-facing interface, at the request of my client, I also created some medium-fidelity concepts for the arguably less complex parent-facing interface.

Because the parent-facing interface only involves filling out a survey, I focused most of my parent-related effort on the mobile concepts, which I felt would be important for filling out surveys on the go. This page describes some of my process to that end.

Initial Research and Sketching

From checking out the SWYC website (theswyc.org) I could see how the current paper SWYC tests are filled out. Armed with an understanding of the SWYC's methodology, and will my own smartphone stocked with apps to play with, I set out to begin sketching. Because the SWYC will need to be filled out every few months within the child's first 5 years, I determined that a native app might be the appropriate choice for something that will be used with relative frequency, and I designed the interface accordingly. It might also be advantageous to design these concepts as a responsive website as well, in case parents need to access it without preemptively installing the app.

Below are some preliminary sketches I made before moving to the computer:

Design and testing process

Once I understood the problem, I came up with a full screen workflow for the mobile app and made some preliminary designs, which I tested with friends who represented proxy users using a prototype on my iPhone that I created using InVision. I then made some small changes to my designs before creating the mockups  below, which I tested using parents of young children who I interviewed at pediatrician offices.

In general, these parents found the designs to be very simple to use. Likewise, they reported that they would prefer filling out the surveys using their smartphone versus filling out paper forms in pediatrician offices.