Melody Mover is an app that uses cueing and community to help Parkinson's patients retain and improve their mobility. As a UI designer, I worked collaboratively with a team of medical students, business students, and developers to design an intuitive, accessible, and encouraging user interface. This project was a capstone course for the team's medical students at UIUC's Carle College of Medicine.
Problem + Outcomes
Making a non-pharmacological way to help Parkinson's patients stay moving accessible.
Problem: Patients with Parkinson’s disease have limited accessible, self-operable, non-pharmacologic solutions available to address their progressive mobility concerns.
Solution: To create an app that utilizes cueing and a social approach to help Parkinson's patients retain mobility. Utilize accessible design practices and focus on designing clear functionality to improve the user experience.
Outcomes: Created distinct, energizing branding from scratch and designed over 100+ prototype screens to iterate on the range of features Melody Mover could have. Utilized accessible design practices and focused on designing clear functionality to create a thoughtful user experience. Implemented social media aspects and gamification to create a more engaging structure, and collaborated with developers to implement the design into a working prototype for a medical program capstone.
Research & Background
Learning about cueing to retain mobility.
Prior to my involvement in this project, research on the effectiveness of cueing for retaining mobility in Parkinson's patients was completed by the medical students on our team. Cueing, or using a noise or other cue to redirect the command to walk to a working part of patients' brains, is an effective, accessible approach that is underutilized. In designing for the target audience, considerations like a simple, intuitive user flow, high-contrast text, a tutorial, and accessibility options were be considered.
Graphic explaining cueing: Sweeney, D.; Quinlan, L.R.; Browne, P.; Richardson, M.; Meskell, P.; ÓLaighin, G. A Technological Review of Wearable Cueing Devices Addressing Freezing of Gait in Parkinson’s Disease. Sensors 2019, 19, 1277. https://doi.org/10.3390/s19061277
Addressing a gap: Available apps with tactile cueing, video cueing, and music pace adjustment offer only one type of cueing per app. Melody Mover stands out from the competition by offering multiple cueing options in one app (metronome, music, sound, and video), which includes a social platform to encourage users through community support.
After an conducting an informal competitive audit and discussing with the team, I identified primary goals for the app UI: to be an easy-to-use, accessible, and approachable. The platform maintains an intentionally straightforward UI to highlight the diverse cueing options and social aspects.
Process Work
How can we make this app intuitive to navigate for folks who may not be tech-savvy?
In my initial sketches and low-fidelity prototypes, I explored the most intuitive way to organize the app's three primary functions: the social media aspect, cueing, and tracking mobility data. The structure is inspired by other popular social media apps, utilizing familiarity to help reduce the app's learning curve. The UI also has clearly labeled pages, buttons, and repetitive layouts to add clarity to the user flow.
Initial sketches.
An info architecture map of the app.
My low-fidelity screens.
Design
An app design that combines community support with cueing to help Parkinson's patients stay mobile.
As I worked on translating the low-fidelity prototype to a high-fidelity prototype, certain features were expanded on to make the user experience more robust. Changes included clarifying the commenting process on others' posts and including more cue options to choose from.
Throughout this project, I learned new prototyping skills in Figma such as working with overlays, scrolling frames, and transitions. I also gained experience working on an interdisciplinary team, which included medical students, business students, and developers and communicating cross-functionally to turn the idea into a design and eventually, a workable MVP prototype.
This project concluded prior to user testing due to the project timeline (this was a capstone project for members of my team), but user testing and iteration would a priority for the next steps.
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