Dre&m AIP
How might we improve the way Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) is accessed and practised?
Role
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User Experience Designer
EMDR is traditionally expensive to administer requiring psychotherapists and their specialist equipment to be in the room with the patient. Can we create a solution that makes this more accessible for both the patient and the psychotherapist.
Tools: XCode, FIGMA, SKETCH, PHOTOSHOP.
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Competitive Benchmarking
There are plenty of competitors offering the service of EMDR to be administered through native apps or over Zoom and Teams. Each with a slightly different brand and value proposition.
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There are significantly fewer native apps for self administered EMDR.
The competitor analysis covered native well-being and psychotherapy apps such as Headspace and Bloom.
Competitive Benchmarking Research Findings
Competitors who provide services aimed at psychotherapists for administering EMDR had a number of obvious areas for improvement. Common issues across each of the platforms included:
- Outdated branding/UI kit – Whilst psychotherapy and wellbeing apps like Headspace and Bloom generally have improved greatly, there were few EMDR specialist websites that were inline with contemporary design trends
- Often it was unclear from the EMDR app landing pages what their technical offering was
- Very few sites products advocated for self administration
In-depth Interview with EMDR Specialist
I spoke at length with an EMDR specialist to discuss her and her colleagues pain points in administering EMDR remotely. We also discussed the idea of creating a Headspace/Bloom style app which would be self administered.
Her feedback on creating an app in which the user could self administer EMDR was very clear. EMDR should only be administered by a trained counsellor or psychotherapist as reliving the trauma of something like PTSD needs to be supervised.
Whilst EMDR should only be administered by professionals, she did advise that AIP (Adaptive information Processing) is less known but takes the same principle of bilateral stimulation and can be used to treat lower categories of trauma than PTSD.
Based on the findings and advice from the interview with an EMDR specialist to not use EMDR and to use Adaptive Information Processing, the project then became focussed around how to make Adaptive Information Processing more accessible.
Ideation
In order to solve the problems found in the competitor benchmarking and the in-depth interview, I roughly wrote down and sketched out a few possible solutions:
- Visual UIs for administering EMDR are often limited and not engaging. Potential use of 3D JavaScript animations could be a more effective treatment. Could gradual panning or motion tweening be more immersive and effective?
- Choose your own track, search database for songs with matching BPMs.
- Bloom and Headspace both have quite a personable, friendly tone and feel. This is great for wellbeing apps but could AIP require a more professional tone focussing on neuroscience and cognition.
Site Map
I created a post it site map writing down some very rough intro/onboarding content that aimed to target some of the nebulous concepts around Adaptive Information Processing.
Branding Assets
Branding assets were created and edited as part of a course to create an IOS application.
I created the app mockups and branding assets in Figma and Swift UI with the help of the course materials from Design Code. 5/5 on the courses and materials, would recommend.
