Chiltern Music Therapy is a not-for-profit organisation providing Neuro Music Therapy. They were struggling with inconsistent, unsafe digital means of helping their therapists provide ongoing support for their patients outside of face-to-face sessions, exacerbated by Covid-19 and lockdown.
We designed and developed a platform, called Duet, that enables the therapist to share 'home programmes' of materials (video, audio, written) and get updates from from their patients. This helped therapists to support their patients through a variety of learning techniques, providing more holistic support and increasing the speed in which the patient can reach their therapeutic goals.
Like with so many partners, we first started off with the problem. Through a series of workshops as part of a Design Thinking sprint, we helped them better understand their users, their needs and frustrations, which in turn helped transform the problem into opportunities that we could prioritise.
This then formed the platform for a cyclical process of designing and testing with users, continually validating our work before a single line of code, minimising risk and ultimately saving time and money.
This user-centred approach means we could successfully deploy a working therapy platform, which is being successfully used throughout the organisation, as well as building a roadmap for the continual development of the product. This is something we have continued to work with Chiltern Music Therapy, now providing ongoing maintenance and development to meet the ongoing needs of the platform’s users.
The key challenge for this project was enabling therapists and their patients to share multimedia content while ensuring security and privacy. Users are able to share audio, video and documents, a key part in the successful delivery of their work outside of face-to-face sessions.
Our team carried out a technical spike, presenting Chiltern Music Therapy with a clear technical plan, including recommendations, alternative approaches and the potential ongoing costs to be aware of based on usage. This gives them a clear understanding of what is required not just now, but for the future growth of the product. A key focus for us is to remove the jargon and complexity sometimes placed around all things ‘digital’, ensuring our partners feel fully informed and have ownership of the key decisions for their products.
For any tool we design, it is crucial that it is something that can be used by everyone. Throughout our work, we used WCAG 2.1 and GDS design standards to plan and test around accessibility. This included a range of techniques from internal audits using checklists informed by the guidelines, accessibility checker tools and the inclusion in design of those with lived experience and/or expertise in neurodiversity and disabilities.
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