Physical Therapy App
CASE STUDY
Project Overview
The product:
We’re creating a new app to help people in Physical Therapy complete their exercises at home. It would set reminders on their phone and guide them through their exercises, without the need of printed handouts.
Project duration:
November 2022 – February 2023
The problem:
Physical therapy clients are often given a list of exercises to do at home on their own, which is necessary to complete in order to improve their injuries. However, due to forgetfulness and lack of motivation, many clients don’t finish their exercises at home.
The goal:
Design a Physical Therapy app that will help users remember how to do their exercises, when to do their exercises, and keep them motivated along the way.
My Role:
UX researcher and designer. Responsible for Paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, iterating on designs and responsive design.
Understanding the user
User research: summary
I interviewed 3 participants who have participated in physical therapy in the last five years. I learned that everyone had a different approach to completing their exercises at home. Some would follow the paper handoffs while others wrote down their own checklists to complete each day. Lack of motivation and no way to track progress of their injury improving seemed to be a common theme among reasons why users eventually stopped their exercises.
User research: summary
Time
Making time to complete exercise routines every day is a challenge
Memory
Exercises are often given to clients on a printed handout which don’t offer visualization to clients on how to flow through an exercise. They can do the exercises incorrectly.
Motivation
Users begin to slowly stop completing their exercises on a daily basis because they are lacking motivation that they are improving.
Persona: Jared
Problem statement:
Jared is a working male whose work and life routine changes daily and wants to be reminded to complete his physical therapy exercises so that he doesn’t forget to do them.
User journey map
Persona: Jared Scenario: Be reminded to complete his physical therapy routine daily with a detailed example of each exercise. Expectations: Detailed walk thru of at home exercises Daily reminders Keep track of exercises completed Be motivated to complete physical therapy
Starting the design
Sitemap
The main navigation was adjusted after a card sort.
Paper wireframes
I started out sketching and doing Crazy Eights to quickly ideate the various screen options for the app.
Stars were used to mark the elements of each sketch that would be used in the initial digital wireframes.
Digital wireframes
Based off of the sketches, I added features that would address the obstacles that users had in completing their at home exercises.
Low-fidelity prototype
The Physical Therapy app low-fidelity prototype
