Inspiration
“Are you trying to disappoint me?”; “Why don’t you just focus?”; “What’s wrong with you?” - These are just some of the questions that I and 129 million other children with ADHD grew up hearing. People with ADHD spend their lives attempting to manage a neurodevelopmental disorder that is stigmatised, undertreated, and underdiagnosed.
We interviewed and surveyed close to 70 parents and teens with ADHD before starting development. We found that some of the biggest issues they faced were accessible information on their disorder and an understanding of how they can manage their symptoms. A lot of the information on how to manage this disorder effectively gets drowned in dozens of unreputable blog posts or $500/USD behavioural treatment programs. Many people with ADHD don't have the time or focus to do the research that is required to manage this disorder effectively. Charly makes this information easily digestible through short and casual instant messages.
What it does
Charly is every ADHD person's personal side-kick that teaches them about how their brain works and helps them manage their symptoms. Charly helps manage symptoms through evidence-backed treatment techniques such as journaling. Many of the world's leading ADHD psychiatrists have said that journalling can be especially helpful for people with ADHD. Journalling can help people with ADHD become aware of their emotional state and the factors in their life that affect their symptoms.
Charly features a growing knowledge-base where people can instantly get evidence-backed information on how to manage ADHD. Every piece of information in the knowledge-base is backed by peer-reviewed research that the person can access for fact-checking purposes.
If a person isn't able to find a solution in our knowledge base, then they can connect with an experienced ADHD advisor. Our advisors provide personalised advice and resources that help people with ADHD manage their symptoms.
Charly also provides data privacy controls that allow the user to download or delete all the data stored about them.
How we built it
We spent three weeks interviewing people in the ADHD community across Reddit, Facebook Groups and in-person. We really wanted to make sure that we were designing a solution that would actually help the ADHD community.
We went back and re-interviewed members from the community at each stage of our product design process. Our constant iteration meant we were able to narrow down the key pieces of information that we needed in this MVP (e.g. how to take your medication).
The Messenger bot was coded in NodeJS (Express) and is hosted on Heroku. We use Firestore (Firebase) for storing data. The pages shown in the Journalling component are created in React using WeUI (WeChat UI) as the design system.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge behind Charly was getting the idea right. We pivoted the feature-set several times. With each interview we conducted, we gained valuable insights that guided our product design process.
Transferring data between postbacks and dialogue waterfalls became quite difficult. We eventually had to resort to saving state about the conversation on the user object in Firestore.
Handling complex conversation flows and a large number of messages can also make the codebase very confusing and makes scaling difficult. Before continuing Charly, we'll need to do a complete recode using a framework like Microsoft's Bot Framework (or a custom one).
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Through our interviews, we had a solid idea of what the ADHD community needed. But we weren't able to start development till June 20th (4 days before the deadline). We were preoccupied with our semester exams and large assignments that we had to finish first. We started on June 20th with an empty folder and a few outdated NodeJS examples from 2017. Now we've built an MVP that we believe will make a massive positive impact on a community that we personally care about.
(and we're proud of everything in the next section)
What we learned
Our team learnt a lot about the product design process, and we learnt how to run effective user interviews. We were initially hesitant to attend in-person events in the ADHD community. However, we learnt that leaving your comfort zone is very important. These in-person events are where we gained the most valuable insights and we realised that people wanted to understand if "what they were doing was working" (journaling/habit tracking) and that they didn't have time to spend days or weeks reading research (knowledge base/advisors).
As first time users, our team became familiar with the capabilities and limitations of the Messenger platform. We're excited to see how we can take advantage of the extensions SDK and the platform during our future development.
We realised that designing a natural-language app is completely different from designing a traditional app. We have several dozen conversations daily. Yet, we really struggled to design conversations that felt even a little natural. Even now, we're not completely happy with the way our conversational flows turned out and we'll be redesigning them before releasing to our first users.
Given our short-development time, we didn't have time to integrate a bot development framework such as MS Bot Framework. We were still able to design some complex conversational flows using our own ad-hoc framework. Developing this primitive 'bot framework' really helped us appreciate the technical issues associated with chatbots. We came up with hacks that allowed us to get past the lack of state we had between conversations. Thanks to our ad-hoc framework, we ultimately only had to resort to saving conversation state when eliciting text prompts (e.g: Setting goals for journals)
What's next for Charly
Behavioural treatment programs are considered first-line treatments for people with ADHD (CDC). Unfortunately, these in-person treatment plans can cost almost $500 USD per month (Foster et al, 2007), and they require a great amount of time and dedication. Recent research has shown that these same techniques can be applied effectively through digital means. Charly has the potential to democratise many of these behavioural treatment techniques, all through a messaging app that all of our interviewees used extensively.
Journalling is a component of many of these behavioural treatment programs, and we plan to expand this heavily by offering intelligent analytics. But this is just the beginning. Our interviews led us to design several features that are tailored to the ADHD community. Some examples include persistent and flexible routines, reminders for family members and reward tools for parents of ADHD kids.
After adding some security measures, and additional privacy controls we'll be launching Charly to our first public users in July.
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