ALS Never Surrender
Client: ALS Never Surrender Foundation
Role: UI/UX Designer + Front-end Developer
Time Frame: 15 weeks
There currently is no known cure for Lou Gehrig's disease(ALS). ALS patient Steph Courdin started the ALS Never Surrender Foundation to combat the that helpless feeling he experienced when he looked into what he could do to help contribute to the search for a cure. Its purpose is to support the development of a patient centered outcomes research (PCOR) tool. The hope is that with enough voluntary crowd sourced patient data, this tool could help ALS researchers discover trends to help better understand, and ultimately, treat and/or cure this often fatal disease.
Unfortunately, due to the rarity of this disease, most research data was pulled from online research and Steph's personal accounts. This obstacle allowed for creative solutions like matching common symptoms of ALS to other more common diseases. This gave deeper avenues of research and helped engineer solutions like a foundation on usability centered design.
This tool would manifest itself into reality as a mobile application, leveraging the simplicity, connectivity, and variety sensors present in modern smartphones. Myself along with 3 other classmates were given the oppurtunity to develop the Android version of the PCOR.
From its need for great experience design at its center to its benefit to the world as a whole; this capstone project was a paragon, as far as learning experiences go.
Before a line of code was even written, the application's userflow was worked and re-worked several times to ensure that changes made to the pre-existing iOS's way of doing things were both warranted and thoroughly researched to be most optimal for the end user.
The constraints of time, unfortunately, didn't allow for all of the feature set illustrated to be fully developed and implemented by semester's end. The focus on building a stable code base with a secure data encryption system for a complex operating system like android took precedence over feature parity.
Please stay tuned for further development!
