M
A social startup, Infiniteach was founded by two autism educators who saw an opportunity to use technology to both deepen and broaden their impact. By taking a human-centered approach to research and design, this project sought to empower teachers, support parents and enable every child with autism to truly learn skills that enable independence.
Children with autism learn differently from other kids. If they learn a skill in one place, they may only associate it with that place, making it hard for them to truly generalize and apply their learnings to the "real world."
Homework can be a bridge between learning environments, but special ed teachers struggle to provide customized homework for each student, while parents constantly wonder what their child is doing at school and how they can help them more.
The iPad app allows special ed teachers to easily plan child-specific activities for the classroom, create custom homework and better communicate with each child's team of supportive adults. The tool gathers data on student performance at both school and home, tracking progress against each student's goals and adaptively advancing the child when he/she is ready and tracking data against IEP goals.
Although I came into the project when the research phase was already done, I was fortunate enough that all interviews and observations were recorded on video. I watched how special ed teachers plan, conduct and track data on student lessons and I saw families in their homes articulate their needs.
My biggest insight after watching all the videos is that parents of children with autism have tremendous patience! Just imagine your child coming home from school crying & not being able to express why. Even after you've asked all the questions to find out why, tried all your usual soothing tricks that normally work, the crying continues. And this every day.
After synthesizing the user research, we articulated design opportunities and shared them in open brainstorms and feedback sessions with the autism community. We sketched, wireframed, tested and iterated upon a series of app feature ideas until our tool was simple yet powerful.
During my time working on this project, I was responsible for designing Infiniteach's brand identity, sketching out design opportunities for the app, wireframing and ultimately designing the key screens.
Next to that, I co-facilicated the user feedback sessions, co-designed the game screens and created a visual styleguide for the app developers.
A beta version is now available in the iTunes store. The final branding of the app itself to SkillChamp was not done by me.
The parents & teachers I met during the feedback-phase are constantly looking for new & better ways to communicate with their child. I hope for at least one parent, this app will help them do homework with their child in a fun way. This project really opened my eyes about why communication is so important & how easily it is taken for granted.