Milestones
A gamified app to help recovering addicts persevere in their recovery process.
Opioid addiction is devastating countless lives. The misuse of and addiction to opioids has created a national crisis affecting millions of Americans.
Recovering from addiction isn't an easy process. Though Individuals can be forced to initiate treatment, self-motivation to persevere when faced with adversity is not something that others can compel.
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We conducted six interviews to get a better understanding of the problem space. Some of the people we had the opportunity to interview
We also simultaneously relied on scholarly articles, blogs, and research papers to gain a better understanding of the domain and the problems associated with it.
We generated an affinity diagram based on the data collected from Interviews and quotes, we organized the data, collected and identified themes. We were able to understand the rehabilitation process better and learn the reasons or decisions that led them into rehabilitation centers.
Based on our research, we were able to come up with key requirements that would define the success of our design solution. We were able to narrow down on areas to focus when designing a solution that would help all the stakeholders.
We believe that the criteria for a good solution would be one that brings motivation, accountability and awareness which would help the individual to introspect. he key requirements would be
To build a support system that helps keep them motivated.
To educate and enable them to help others facing similar situations.
To inculcate more fun and technology in the process of treatment.
"How might we improve the effectiveness of the rehab process for opioid addicts?"
We devised the following personas based on the interview data collected. They reflect our target user's needs, behaviors, goals, and determination. The following are the two archetypes that we came up with:
We then proceeded with brainstorming design solutions along with other stakeholders. We came out with the following ideas, which would be socially, economically, and technologically feasible.
Journaling daily habits to analyze and understand positive and negative patterns related to opioid addiction and make changes to lead better life.
Gamified goals and achievements made to induce extrinsic motivation which over time converts into intrinsic motivation to stay sober.
Connecting recovering addicts with accountability partners and forming social bonds to help them re enter society with confidence.
We found that Milestone Celebration would be one that meets our key requirements of providing motivation to persist in recovery while having a fun alternative to tackle the long and strenuous pathway to sobriety.
After deciding on our design solution, we decided to sketch out real world scenarios showcasing the use of our design solution with the personas we contrived previously.
Annie Potts using the milestone app to reach her goals and share her story with others to inspire them.
Jonny Walker uses the milestones app to help set goals and achievements as he gets into rehab.
Our team decided to start with whiteboarding which proved to be quite useful in bringing out new ideas and concepts that we could utilize in our application. We discussed different features that the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) would have and started drawing them out onto a whiteboard.
Based on our previous whiteboarding session, we decided to build a low fidelity prototype to go through the structure and to smoothen the workflow. The low fidelity prototype gave us flexibility to test various designs and allowed for us to perform user testing as well during this stage to get some user reviews on the design.
We used our low-fidelity prototypes to conduct our initial user test, and found that
After our initial redesign, we tested our new interactive prototype with users to see how it performed on the tests we designed. Some of the findings from these tests are as follows:
Involving stakeholders from the start of the project helps us gather critical insights into the problems they face. They are also more involved and the process, we can design a solution that they are happy with.
User research is an essential part of the design process. It helps gather contextual feedback on the product and provides backing for our design decisions.
Feedback is vital to the design process; feedback from our potential users, stakeholders, and developers would allow us to create a better experience for our end users.
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