Konnection

A social app to connect parents with children with special needs to other parents and professionals. Konnection is an app for the parents by the parents.

Problem Statement

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It is never wrong to say that “It takes a village to raise a child.” Being a Physical therapist and working with children with special needs, I found that parents and family members spend a significant amount of their time to find curated information on internet. Research found that many parents spend more time in finding the right information than to provide care to their children. This causes frustration and stress.

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Demo

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Objective

+ To provide a single platform for curated and verified information for the families for children with special needs.
+ To provide safe, private and secure platform to support each other.
+ To maintain an active resource directory so that parents don’t have to spend significant amount of their time to find the right information.
+ To help parents to build their community by creating connections with others.

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My Role

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User Centered Design Process

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During this phase of design process, I worked on understanding my users needs and pain points empathetically. This process helped me to find the right problem and it provided the idea of the solution.

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Current Solutions

Facebook parent groups (Facebook provides range of parents groups catering specific needs rather holistic needs.)

Google search engine (The information is not curated with the needs of an individual family)

Local support groups (Often the information is outdated)

User Profile

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The product will be mainly used by parents and families with children with special needs, who have access to internet and smart phone. The age of the users varies from 18 to 60 years.

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User Research

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I conducted both Qualitative and Quantitative research to understand the needs and challenges of the users.

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According to CDC gov in the United States there are about one in six, or about 17%, of children aged 3 through 17 years have a one or more developmental disabilities.

Total number of children with disabilities are around 9.4 million.

Having a child with special needs put significant amount of stress. In search of providing the best resources and support, on an average a parent spend time 20 hrs/week to take care of the child needs and wants, and out of that 10-12 hours/week time is spent to find information regarding services and resources.

In order to get the real statistic data, an online survey was conducted for a sample size of 100 members in both qualitative and quantitative methods.

+ 62 women and 38 men

+ Age 25 to 57 yrs

Takeaways
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Most of the participants mentioned that they use Facebook groups to share and gain information from other people.
The participants want to have a single and safe platform so that they can share and find resources so that they can save time and spend quality time with their children.
There is no app that serves this purpose. So, the market has a gap of a digital platform for serving the families with children with special needs.

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Through this process, I worked on defining the user’s personality, needs, pain points and goals to created a hypothetical persona who represents the target population.

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Persona 1

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Persona 2

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Empathy Map

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Through this process, I worked on defining the user’s story by creating scenarios, and story board, card sorting and user-flow.

Story Board

Story board reflects a story of a parent goes through daily basis specially when they are new parent or don't where to start.

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Card Sorting

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After collecting the insights from the user interviews, I opted for card sorting. Feature cards were sorted by 10 participants for understanding their understanding and expenctations.

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Information Architecture

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After collecting all the insights from user interviews, surveys, personas, card sorting and IA, I created the prototype. Both low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframe were designed as per the users insights.

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