Visual Routine
As team lead for the design of Visual Routine, a powerful app designed to help parents of autistic or special needs children manage their daily routines with ease, I led a team of designers in creating a user-friendly and accessible design that met the needs of our target audience.
Visual Routine is a powerful app designed to help parents of autistic or special needs children manage their daily routines with ease. With customizable pictures, audio, and text, Visual Routine lets you tailor routines to your child's specific needs, providing audio feedback to help keep them on track.
The app was originally designed for iOS 6, just months before the iOS 7 redesign. While other apps were updated to the new flat design aesthetic, we opted to keep the familiar look and feel of the original design to ensure that it remained accessible to the target market of parents with special needs children who may not be tech-savvy.
To modernize the app without sacrificing its usability, we made subtle changes to the design, reducing the use of skeumorphism while maintaining the familiar technical metaphors that users were accustomed to.
Together, my team worked to tailor the app's routines to the specific needs of children with special needs, providing audio feedback and customizable pictures and text to ensure that the app was as user-friendly as possible.
As team lead, I oversaw the design process, ensuring that each element of the app was cohesive and intuitive. My team and I worked collaboratively to create a design that was both aesthetically pleasing and highly functional, with individual checkboxes for each option, easy-to-use edit screens, and a smooth transition between screens.
Icon Design
One key design element we updated was the icon, which we smoothed out and gave a chalkboard theme to represent the idea of a checklist. We also overhauled the bevels and shading to be aligned with iOS 6, creating a cohesive and modern design.
Home & Edit Screens
The home and edit screens feature a fading transition to keep users oriented as they switch between screens, while the footer bar allows for easy access to additional features in future versions.
View & Edit Routine
The view and edit routine screens feature individual checkboxes for each option, making it easy for both patients and caregivers to keep track of progress. In the edit screen, users can only change the title, rearrange steps, or tap on an individual step to make customizations, while the edit step screen provides a preview of each step, making it easy to see how changes will look before committing.
Edit Step
In the Edit Step screen of Visual Routine, we faced a unique challenge: how to pack a lot of functionality into one object, the step.
To solve this problem, we implemented a range of features that allow users to customize their routines with ease. These include the ability to rearrange choices within a step, turn on up to 4 choices, set a custom picture and custom audio for each step, and set a custom caption for each step.
To make the process of customization as intuitive as possible, we also included a preview box at the top of the screen, which allows users to check the caption length and ensure that the photo they've chosen looks good in the box before committing to it. This feature is incredibly helpful for users who want to make sure that their customization choices are just right before saving their changes.
Overall, Visual Routine was the result of a collaborative effort, with my team and I working together to create an innovative and user-friendly app that helps promote structure and routine for special needs children.
