INCLUSIVE
Helping parents of children with Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities navigate a complicated healthcare system in NYC.
UX/UI
Design System
Accessibility
OVERVIEW
For parents of children with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities (IDD), finding the right healthcare provider is a complex, time-consuming, and often overwhelming challenge. In partnership with Inclusive, a NYC-based nonprofit, we designed a secure, centralized digital tool that helps parents easily find, evaluate, and connect with trusted healthcare providers.
ROLE
TEAM
9 Designers, 5 Researchers, 4 Product Strategists, 4 Content Strategists, 1 Project Lead, 1 Engineer
TOOLS
DURATION
CONTEXT
Inclusive x Tech Fleet is guiding Parents to Speech Therapists
This project was a collaboration between Inclusive and Tech Fleet to develop a tool as a central source enabling parents of children with IDD to find and access healthcare providers, and in this case specifically Speech Therapists.
PROBLEM
BREAKDOWN OF THE PROBLEM
01
There was no centralized and updated database for speech therapy resources for special needs children.
Additionally, current listings do not take into account when providers move or no longer offer services.
02
Navigating the complicated process of finding a Speech Therapist is a time-consuming challenge.
Parents are busy managing work and caring for their children with special needs.
03
Parents want to have all the necessary information on providers at a glance.
Parents don’t want to decipher medical or insurance jargon. This becomes an issue of accessibility to services.
SOLUTION
We built Inclusive's Online Resource Guide as an accessible, easy-to-navigate central source helping parents find and access Speech Therapists for their children with IDD.
Parents can find speech therapists by keyword and location, or by browsing intuitive resource categories.
We identified the most critical decision-making factors for NYC parents. Our filters allow them to narrow results to see only the providers that truly fit their unique situation.
We designed Provider Profiles to answer parents' most pressing questions immediately and help them make informed decisions.
We also included the ability to bookmark providers, allowing parents to curate their options and return to them later.
STRATEGIC APPROACH & DESIGN PROCESS
Understanding the sensitive nature of our users' needs, we adopted a lean and iterative process.
To establish an informed foundation, we began with a deep dive into the existing ecosystem our users had to navigate. Then, we parsed through previous design work done for Inclusive to align with their mission and brand values.
With a grounded understanding, we designed a preliminary user flow focused on the core experience of finding a trusted speech therapist.
This flow served to align the cross-functional team and identify potential pain points early.
Parallel to our design work, our research team executed a targeted outreach strategy leveraging Inclusive's community networks.
Our user base, parents of children with Intellectual and/or Intellectual Disabilities, were a niche group and very busy. More importantly, they were tired of giving and not receiving anything meaningful in return, so it was a challenge for the Research team to find available users.
✦ To start testing as soon as participants were available, we rapidly progressed to low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes that would serve as concrete starting points for testing and feedback.
This would allow us to validate our core assumptions, identify major usability issues early, and iterate on the foundational structure.
Using competitive analysis of other online directories, we created two users flows that allowed users to navigate the website in the way they found most intuitive while lessening the burden of guesswork.
Flow 1: Using the Search Bar
Users are able to search by entering keywords into the Search Bar and additionally adding their ZIP code to narrow down the results.
Flow 2: Using Drop Down Categories
Users are able to search by choosing categories and selecting sub-categories from the drop down menu.
DESIGN SYSTEM APPROACH
✦ Co-leading a Design System with Accessibility Built in from the Beginning
During this project, both of the Design leads left to pursue other opportunities, so another team designer and I stepped up to take ownership and co-lead the team on the creation of our Design System.
As a Design System Co-Lead, I championed establishing accessibility as a core principle of our Design System, ensuring our product was inclusive by design, not as an afterthought.
Parents of children with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities (IDD) often have disabilities themselves, so it was important to make sure the Online Resource Guide was accessible from the beginning.
✦ Color Accessibility
Our colors meet Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for contrast to meet the needs of people with vision impairment or color blindness.
✦ Focus States
Often overlooked, focus states highlight interactive components and are crucial for wayfinding when using a screen reader or for people with limited mobility.
✦ Scalability and accounting for the smallest devices available
Our Design system included a scalable Type System and 8-pt grid for mobile and desktop, ensuring the experience was consistent and scalable for future features.
Many people do not have access to the latest mobile phone models, so we also took into account the smallest devices available.
SYNTHESIZING USER RESEARCH DATA
After a targeted recruitment effort, our Research team conducted surveys and in-depth interviews with parents from the IDD community. Synthesizing this data allowed us make meaningful changes based on user insights.
Here are the Key Changes made after hearing from Parents:
01
Updated our design based on parent input of the most useful information to have at a glance:
Billing and Insurance
Years of Practice
Areas of Expertise
Ages Served
02
Adjusted filters to meet the needs of parents into easier-to-understand terms.
Content design was important in this context as a lot of medical and insurance jargon is inaccessible to many parents.
03
Made Reviews a higher priority.
Parents noted reviews were important and often in interviews they brought up having strong support networks of other parents they trust.
04
Addressed concerns about the safety and privacy of their children when trying to find resources by:
Not requiring account creation or personal information when searching
05
Added Verification tags to indicate that provider qualifications have been verified.
We also added info on Certifications and Specializations with Tooltips for further info.
NAVIGATING PROJECT PIVOTS
Midway through the project, a significant opportunity to pivot directly into development emerged. Our client, impressed with the fast paced progress, our passionate team, and the prototype's potential to aid users, decided to move forward into accelerating development.
This shifted our goal from handing off a prototype to the next phase of design and testing to an MVP product, introducing the new challenge of developer handoff.
✦ With the departure of our design leads, my design system co-lead and I proactively assumed ownership of the developer handoff process and established a new workflow from the ground up.
Working closely with developers, we selected and configured Zeplin as our single source of truth, and organized all screens, assets, and specifications.
We audited and refined our component library to ensure visual and technical consistency.
We meticulously annotated interactions, states, and responsive behaviors within Zeplin, allowing the development team to build with precision and reducing back-and-forth clarification.
While we began efforts on developer handoff, establishing a foundation to speed up efficiency, our Research team conducted usability testing using our prototypes that were updated through user feedback.
01
Parents were not used to the idea of having choice when it comes to Speech Therapists and were fed up with outdated lists.
02
Additional research into a better filter name for Insurance is required to better describe the items under it and lessen confusion. Parents also commented a parking filter was irrelevant for NYC.
03
Parents in NYC often have transportation challenges specific to their location.
04
Users consistently said other parents were their greatest resource navigating obtaining services for their child. Also, managing disability is an exhausting, continuous process, so leisure activities and programs were of interest for the next phases of the product.
We applied these insights to our prototypes and set up a handoff guide for the teams that would come after us and continue the work.
SOLUTION
Final Outcome: Inclusive's Online Resource Guide
Inclusive’s Online Resource Guide is an accessible, easy-to-navigate hub that allows parents to find Speech Therapists for their children with disabilities and view the most important information at a glance.
Filter Results
Narrow down provider search results by using filters highlighting the most important aspects parents are searching for in NYC.
View Speech Therapist Information and Bookmark Their Page
See all the necessary information at a glance on Speech Therapists to make informed decisions. Save provider pages for later through Bookmarking.
REFLECTION:
MY THOUGHTS ON THIS PROJECT + LESSONS LEARNED
This was a difficult and fast paced project with a complicated subject matter, but the journey was rewarding and I was able to contribute to a platform that will help lessen the burden on parents of children with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities.
1. Challenges: A complicated subject matter and quickly adapting to pivots.
I had no prior experience with the healthcare provider system for disabilities, so it was a learning curve to work on a complicated subject matter.
I was proactive in taking on leadership roles when our UX Design leads left during the project.
2. Key Takeaway: I honed my skills bringing clarity from ambiguity.
Stepping up to co-lead the design system and developer handoff in the absence of senior leads was a pivotal growth moment in supporting my fellow designers in periods of uncertainty.
3. What I’d do differently next time: I would implement a "show early, show often" approach, with more curated updates for stakeholders.
Since our team had the ambitious goal of launching within 8 weeks, the weekly updates for stakeholders contained a lot of info, which means things were overlooked. This led to last minute, time-intensive changes late in the process. Instead, I would curate smaller, more frequent updates that were more digestible and ensuring continuous alignment.
