Online Support and Intervention for Child Anxiety

2017–2018 @ Red Ninja Ltd.

Design Workshops
User Experience Design
User Interface Design
Visual identity & logo
Front-end Design (HTML & CSS)
Production Management

Safe Steps app displayed on a laptop, smartphone and tablet.

The Client

This project was a collaboration with the University of Reading. Specifially working with the AnDY research clinic, who provide “assessments, treatment and research to children and young people suffering with anxiety and/or depression.”

The Platform

Online Support and Intervention for Child Anxiety is an online treatment programme developed to help parents and carers of children who struggle with anxiety. The platform consists of three main elements:

A webapp that parents and carers themselves login to, where they learn skills to help their child week by week. Building up the knowledge and confidence to assist their children through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
A webapp where the Clinicians supporting the parents and carers can track progress, review homework and schedule therapy sessions.
And a game for the children to play which is both a reward to encourage engagement and a tool to help reinforce the key lessons learned though the treatment.

My responsibilities

Planning and running workshops with the university research team, clinical therapists, parents and children.
Using insights from these workshops to inform the designs, in a iterative process, with user-testing feedback informing each new iteration of the designs.
Designing the entire system: from user-flows, wireframes, UI design to the branding.
Overseeing the development process and helping with front-end development, quality assurance and bug testing.
Creative direction of the children’s game, working with an outsourced games company.

Workshop series

I planned and delivered a series of workshops to engage the specific groups involved in this project. This included parents, children, and clinical psychologists from the University of Reading and CAMHS (Child and adolescent mental health services, part of the NHS).

A collage of photos showing people participating in design workshops to help create OSI.

Wireframe development

Samples of annotated wireframes and wireframe development taken from iterative design workshops, which were used to scope and refine the requirements and design of the platform.

User interface visual development

The client was keen on a professional and modern visual style but ensuring that the app looks approachable and friendly was important to allow users to feel comfortable.

Illustrations were developed with the game's illustrator to help the web-app feel more approachable and fit with the game.