This article is just an overview of the app. If you’re curious about my personal growth and reflections throughout this project, read it here.
Beo (Beo.id) is an app designed to help preschooler, especially those who have mild to moderate autism with nonverbal condition, to learn objects vocabularies.
*Pic above: illustrated by our designer, perfectly composed by Apple’s icon composer
My team was moved by a community called caRE&reACH, a community that supports families and caregivers of children with special needs. We believe that every child have same right and same opportunity as normal person, but unfortunately, not all environment are supportive to them. We found that many child’s condition were often late-diagnosed or mis-diagnosed, so they were automatically get late treatment or even worse, wrong treatment.
Children with autism, especially nonverbal type, have difficulty in interacting, communicating, expressing their thoughts and feelings. This makes communication between them and other people extremely challenging. This doesn’t happen because they’re trying to be difficult, but simply because they are unable to express themselves.
Without early support, there could be lifelong barriers hindering their education, independence, and even employment later in life. To make things worse, interviews with the relevant Balinese community, experts and parents of autistic children suggest that these children do not have access to suitable learning tools for them in the Indonesian language.
That’s why we built BEO — Belajar Objek (means learning objects in English). It’s an app designed for children aged four and up, with mild to moderate autism, and are non-verbal in nature. Imagine BEO as a customizable, vocabulary book, enabling children with autism to recognize and name objects around them. In short, BEO equips them with the building blocks they need to craft sentences to express themselves.
A child learning using BEO is not just them using another app. It’s a tool to elevate their skills in communicating, expressing themselves, and eventually connecting with the world around them.
Beo (noun) is a birdname in Indonesia. It’s also known as Parrot. Beo or parrot tend to mimic human words and they can also be trained for doing it. By using Beo as our app name and our mascot, we wanted to encourage the user aka children with nonverbal autism to learn words from the app.
When interacting with people, we often unaware that many basic skills are actually involved.
For example, when we are talking to someone, we look at them, pouring out our thoughts into words while hearing our own voice, being aware of our surroundings and also doing hand gestures. All of these are happening at the same time.
What we’re experiencing and doing in an interaction, subconsciously involved taking in information, using muscles to act, and making sense of sound input. All of these process were done by our brain naturally to us but children with autism could struggle with these skills, even handling everything all at once.
Our main concern in the way children communicate, because communication skills affects how human live their life. But we also aware—following diagram above—that in order to have learning skills, there are prerequisites skills such as sensory skills, sensory motor, and perceptual motor skills. Not all skills development could be helped by any app, some can only be taught directly in real life. So, we identified which skills that is improvable using an app, or technologies provided by apple. Those skills are visual, auditory, and touch.
We believe that the environment is one of the most important to support children with autism. Because of that, we intended the app to be usable for parents and children. These are our user persona.