Section I. Low Fidelity Prototype
Section II. Development Process
Section III. Usability Tests and Analysis of Results
Section IV. Questionnaires

I. Low Fidelity Prototype

Introduction
Our original low-fidelity prototypes were laid out in Visual Studio although we knew that we were not using visual studio for development. We chose to do this because Visual studio has a wider selection of widgets available in their visual editor and also requires little to no coding to be done for the form to be compiled whereas SWT requires much more coding to be done.
Included are sample screens from the prototypes developed by David and Stephen. The ideas from these two prototypes made up much of the design of the final prototype.

Prototype Main Screen
This was the Main screen of Stephen’s prototype. We adapted our overall layout from this form, utilizing the vertical navigation bar on the side to move between functions. Also the Calendar layout seen here is similar to the one used in the final project.

Figure 1: Prototype Main Screen

Prototype Task Screen
This screen was developed by David and ultimately ended up being the main screen for our final prototype. We particularly liked this design because if the tasks were minimized it allowed you to view a large number of tasks at once. If you expanded a task however it gave you detailed information on the task as well as the ability to leave feedback about it. We felt that this gave the form a lot of functionality and meant that the user didn’t have to familiarize themselves with as many forms.


Figure 2: Prototype task screen

Prototype New Task Screen
This form which was developed by David ended up being almost identical in the final prototype. It is a simple easy to follow form that is clean and gets all of the needed information.


Figure 3: Prototype new task screen

Prototype Information page
This page was part of Steve’s low Fidelity prototype. We really liked the idea and the layout of this form but we decided that it was a lower priority item on the final prototype since it was a more of a convenience feature and not something that couldn’t be done in another program with little difficulty. Also we were not entirely sure what type of information to include on the pages and how we should break that information down. Therefore although there is a space for it and plans for this function it wasn’t implemented in the final prototype.


Figure 4: Prototype information page


Prototype Daily Summary
This screen was originally part of David’s prototype and was included in the final design because it was clean and accomplished the purpose with very little extra information.


Figure 5: Prototype daily summary

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II. Development Process

Our initial idea was to develop a software package to aid in the caretaking of autistic children. Our first task was to decide who would be the primary user of the software. We decided that we wanted to focus on the parents of autistic children. Although we wanted to focus on the parents of Autistic children we wanted to make sure the software would be useful to the other people that would be in the home taking care of the child. This category of people was mainly made up of home-therapists and clinicians.

The first step in developing our project was to determine the major needs of the caretakers of Autistic children. In order to determine what these needs were we interviewed several people who have experience interacting with autistic children in several different capacities including, parents, teachers, clinicians, and therapists. This gave us several different viewpoints on the subject which allowed us to make an informed decision about what features to focus on in our software. The most beneficial person we talked to was the parent of a child whose son was recently diagnosed with autism. One of the greatest challenges she told us about was the challenge of keeping meaningful records about her son’s performance of tasks. She had developed a form she was using in excel however it was still difficult to keep this things organized and to enter data. Also it was impossible to visualize the data over spans of time because the data is all stored separately. We decided that this would be one of the major focuses of our project: data collection and visualization.

• Daily Task organization
• Information recording and reporting and visualization
• Communication between parents, physicians, therapists and clinicians
• Recording milestones

Once we knew the major needs we had to determine which of them could be best met by our software program. Our major concerns in regard to what features to focus on were importance and feasibility. We wanted to try to use our time efficiently and find a medium between implementing the most useful tasks and as many tasks as we could. In order to do that we had to decide which were most important and we also had to try to estimate how difficult it would be to implement each of the tasks.

Daily Tasks

Adding and removing tasks

Marking tasks as completed

Recording observations about tasks

Calendar

Adding and removing appointments

Viewing appointments

Being able to set recurrences for appointments

Information

Keeping emergency information for the child

Storing contact information for everyone who works with the child

Store Behavioral protocols

Store Dietary Restrictions

Visualizations

Develop a meaningful way to search a large amount of data over a period of time

Allow for searching and filtering data

After we decided on the list of tasks and features we wanted to include we had to decide upon a layout. In order to brainstorm as many different ideas as possible about how to design the interface for our project we made several different prototypes. David and Steve each designed our own while Lauren and Dyami worked together to develop a third prototype. The three prototypes that were developed ended up being rather similar but we decided to use a combination of the prototypes that David and Steve developed. One of the features of David’s design that we liked the most was the Daily Task Screen. We decided that this should be the focal point of the project as well as the main screen because one of the main focuses of our software was organization and management of the daily tasks.

After deciding on our layout we went to work implementing the design. We chose to use Java with SWT, the Standard Widget Toolkit. We also chose to do our development using Eclipse, a free java IDE that has many useful tools for using SWT. One of the main reasons we chose this was that David was familiar with SWT and knew how to implement several of the features in SWT that we did not know how to implement in Visual Studio. These two features were browser integration in order to imbed flash into our project which we used for our data visualization as well as the help. We also planned to implement the calendar using flash and imbedding it with a browser. The other function that we didn’t know how to implement in Visual Studio was the drop down menus that we use in the task display.

David and Steve worked on the Interface Design while Lauren and Dyami worked on the data visualization in flash. We decided to focus on implementing working and testable versions of several of the functions instead of completely finishing the functions. We decided to ignore the need for long term data storage and use prefabricated datasets read from text files in order to show the feasibility of our features and ideas.

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III. Usability Tests and Analysis of Results

Introduction
We conducted a total of 5 usability tests with a variety of subjects in order to see how it would be received by the different types of people that could be using the features of this software. We test 2 parents of an autistic child, which is our primary user group, 2 therapists who conduct home therapy with autistic children, and 1 Speech pathologist that conducts office based therapy with autistic children. We were hoping to find out different information from the 3 different sets of users. From the parents we were hoping to determine the overall ease of use as well as the interest level in the specific features we have implemented as well as what other features would be useful on a day to day basis. We were hoping to determine from the home therapists if our software would enable them to communicate better with the other therapists. From the Speech Pathologists we were hoping to find if they felt the communication aspects would allow them to make decisions more effectively and also if they would recommend this kind of software to their clients as a way to organize and track treatment.

Reports

Subject 1:

Subject 1 is a 40 year old mother of three young children ages one to three. Her two eldest children, two and three, have been diagnosed with minor development delays while her one year old son Ben has been diagnosed with Autism. The subject has on average two therapists coming everyday to work with Ben which she balances with a career in Real Estate.

The subject was an experienced computer user and quickly became familiarized with the interface. She easily completed the tasks with little problem, though she did have several suggestions for improvement.

1. Fix the lack of a help function.
2. The ability to print monthly calendar.
3. Have the ability to print or email the data as a single option

The subject was an experienced computer user and quickly became familiarized with the interface. While overly satisfied with the product he did have several suggestions for improvement.

1. Fix the lack of a help function.
2. Ability to automate the sending of data on a daily/weekly basis.

Subject 3:

Subject 3 was a 23 year old graduate student in speech pathology. She currently works conducting home therapy for a young autistic child twice a week.

The function of the software that most excited the subject was the communications aspect with email and print outs as well as the ability to set who assigned a specific task. The biggest problem that she faces in home therapy is that she doesn’t always no what the other therapists are working on with the child or if anything has proven to be particularly effective. They felt that the communications would enable them to be much more effective with their therapy.
Suggestions for improvement

1. Lack of help
2. Add ability to search data/tasks by therapist/goal/and time.
3. Include a Goal section in the description of the task

Subject 4:

Subject 4 was a 23 year old graduate student in speech pathology. She current works conducting home therapy for two young autistic children several times a week.

As with the other therapist the idea of facilitating communication between therapists was an exciting prospect. Communication between several people who work with the child when none of them are there at the same time is very difficult and a centralized system would make things much simpler.
Suggestions for improvement:

1. lack of help
2. Encoding daily reports as good/bad days and then visualize that on the timeline by color coding.
3. Ability to view calendar and get both all appointments and tasks for a day by viewing info for that day.

Subject 5:

Subject 5 is a 25 year old Speech Pathologist that works at Kennedy Krieger Institute in their school for autistic children conducting one on one speech therapy in a school/office setting. She sees her patients once a week.

The therapist was interested in the Daily reports and the abilities to email them because they often find it difficult to obtain that kind of daily information in an organized fashion from the parents. They also feel it would be something that they would recommend as a way of organize and tracking all of the therapies and other things that their children is involved with.
Suggestions for improvement:

1. lack of help
2. Ability to have a set task list for each day of the week (especially useful for older children who are in school)
3. Ability to print daily task list.
4. Ability to search history by task/keyword/time/therapist
5. Create a wizard to walk the user through setting up all the needed elements the first time they use it.

Summary of tests

None of the subjects had any problems carrying out the assigned tasks. Most claimed that the simple interface made it very easy to use and to find things because there were not a large number of menus to have to look through to find functions. I would say that the major thing we got out of the testing was what directions we can take the project in. None of us have first hand experience in caring for autistic children so lack first hand experience. The tests gave us a lot of ideas of useful features that we could add to the project. One of the major pieces of information we gathered was a list of things we could include in the info section that could be useful. We liked the idea of having it but having no medical experience we were not sure what things we should include. However from talking to all our subjects we have determined that we should include emergency contact, and dietary information, behavioral protocols, development levels, and contact information for all doctors and therapists.

Evaluation of Problems and Suggestions

Conclusion

Overall the usability tests were very informative. We have gained a lot of information and many suggestions for ways in which we can expand upon the functionality of KidSTART to make it more functional to our targetaudience.

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IV. Questionnaires

KidSTART Pre-Test Questionnaire

General Questions:
1) Age Range: ? under 18 ? 18-25 ? 26-40 ? 41-60 ? 61 and over

2) Do you have a Personal Computer (PC) in your household?
Yes / No

3) If yes, how often do you use the computer?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Never Daily

Autism Related Questions:
4) Are you responsible for taking care of an autistic child?
Yes / No

5) Are you familiar with the DIR/Floortime treatment model for children with autistic spectrum disorders?
Yes / No

6) Have you ever used a scheduling tool to keep track of daily appointments and tasks?
Yes / No

7) Would you consider using a scheduling tool on a computer to keep track of daily appointments and tasks?
Yes / No

8) Do you think having a scheduling tool on the computer would be helpful in tracking daily appointments and tasks for an autistic child?
Yes / No

KidSTART Post-Test Questionnaire

1) I liked using this application
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Strongly Disagree Neutral Strongly Agree

2) Would this software be useful in monitoring the caretaking of your Autistic child?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Extremely Difficult Neutral Extremely Easy

3) Ease of entering in a new task
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Extremely Difficult Neutral Extremely Easy

4) Ease of entering in a new observation
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Extremely Difficult Neutral Extremely Easy

5) Ease of viewing daily tasks
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Extremely Difficult Neutral Extremely Easy

6) Ease of viewing weekly/monthly appointments

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Extremely Difficult Neutral Extremely Easy

7) Ease of compiling/printing monthly observations summary
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Extremely Difficult Neutral Extremely Easy

8) What would make the application easier to use?

9) What problems occurred during usage?

10) What features did you like or dislike about this application?

11) Please list any additional comments.

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