Project background
People with skin conditions like psoriasis and dermatitis often struggle with managing compulsive behaviors, such as scratching and picking at their skin. We want to provide them with a therapeutic behavior change activity to help them address this behavior.
Goal
A therapeutic tool that users can interact with in real time to delay or diffuse urges.
My role
Senior Product Designer
Visual design
UX flow mapping
Motion direction
Competitive analysis
Team
Product Managers
Engineers
Science
QA
Legal team
Timeline
March 2023 - June 2023
Urge surfing is a technique to manage unwanted behaviors. Instead of giving in, you ride out the urge like a surfer on a wave, and it eventually passes. As urges go unfed, future ones become weaker, making the initial waves the hardest to manage.
How do we best support individuals to accept and live with an urge?
Treatment
To address the urge to scratch, the "urge surfing" treatment guides patients in riding out the wave of impulses. This is accomplished by encouraging them to engage their hands in a therapeutic activity on a screen.
Concepts
Here are examples of a few concepts that I designed in collaboration with an engineer and a scientist.
After testing a few of those designs, we saw that people responded the best to the “blobby shapes” design, and some of the other designs made them dizzy.
Place both thumbs on the screen to change the pattern through slow movement. Enjoy a meditative experience with moving shapes.
Onboarding for first-time users
Breathing exercise
The activity