In the special needs community, a common tool used for teaching appropriate and desired behavior is a token economy. A token economy is a system used to manage a child's behavior by providing positive reinforcement. The reinforcement is predicated on delivering the child tokens for completing tasks or demonstrating desirable behaviors which the child can use to buy items or activities. In addition to reinforcement, the token economy methodology is excellent for teaching the child independence as the child learns through the token economy that he/she has some level of control over how much and often he/she can earn a token. In addition, when quantitative tokens are used it opens the door to academic skills involving math. For these reasons, we decided to design a mobile application for parents, teachers, and caregivers that will digitally track the award and redemption of tokens and track a child's progress over time.
For the first stage of the project, our goal was to assess the tools currently available on the market. We then gathered qualitative and quantitative data on our target users and designed a low-fidelity prototype based on this research. The low-fidelity prototype was reviewed by peer HCI/HFE practitioners and was evaluated in the form of cognitive walkthroughs and heuristic evaluations. In addition, we solicited feedback from real users to gain a well-rounded assessment of the usability of the low-fidelity prototype.
