CYNCH

A mobile application that provides young people
in alternative care access to their personal information

DESIGN IN DETAIL

01 research

RESEARCH GOALS

• Gain an in-depth understanding of the foster care system and how user experience plays a factor virtually.
• Identify trends and insight into competitors and how they’ve accomplished creating an app for people in foster care and how they navigate
• Identify in-direct competitors that create apps for Cynch’s age demographic and gain an understanding of their trends and ideologies
• Gain a deep insight into Cynch’s users’ goals, needs, frustrations, and motivations.

Market RESEARCH FINDINGS

The Chronicle of Social Change comprised a list of online resources, but the apps that are mentioned for this demographic seem to have been discontinued.

• There are not many competitors in this industry. The apps that are on the market are either not specifically for youth, or they have been discontinued.
  
• The product would be provided by the young person’s caseworker.
  
• Many government official apps are not designed with a younger audience in mind.
  
• There is currently little regard to the audience having control over their own lives and data.

USER RESEARCH RESULTS

I conducted an interview of 6 participants of ages 16-22 who were either in high school or college via Zoom to understand what goals or frustrations users have when interacting with these specific apps and to identify and understand the needs and pain points of users using apps to access their medical information. I then had users share their screens and walk me through an app they use frequently to understand their overall experience using an app.

You can view the complete interview debrief here.

Overview

02 ideation

I begun ideation with a few sketches and then expanding upon my design in my wireframes.

expanding upon the ideation

final wireframes - pre testing

03 USABILITY TESTING

Using a small but diverse set of subjects I solicited feedback for proof of concept and future features and functionality.

04 FINAL UI

features

• The calendar overview on the home screen will click into a full calendar with task overview
• Courses and task overview, ability to edit, add and delete
• Medical history and appointment overview. Ability to fill out forms and check-in appointment.

next steps

Phase 02
In the next iteration of this project, I would like to work on implementing more features including:

• Calendar page
• Case history page
• Form completion

final reflection

I was the only designer on this project, but I had the privilege of interacting with the development team. There was a learning curve when communicating between teams, but through this experience, we were able to help each other and I learned how to appropriately interact with developers.​ I am excited to continue working on Cynch and look forward to seeing how it's developed.

Overall, the design had a usability test completion rate of 100% (5 out of 5 participants) when navigating the prototype.