ktalk: an online community for young adults with chronic kidney disease

Client: 
National Kidney Foundation of Michigan
Role: 
Site Designer
Methods: 
Mind Mapping, Personas & Scenarios, Wireframes, Mockups, Visual Design, Drupal
Summary: 
Designed and built an online support community for young adults with chronic kidney disease.

Young adults with chronic kidney disease struggle with anger, depression and feelings of isolation coping with an illness that is most common among the elderly. The National Kidney Foundation of Michigan (NKFM) has a successful peer mentoring program to help young adults and reached out to researchers at the University of Michigan School of Information to expand this program into an online support community. To kick-off the project I led an IDEO-style deep dive brainstorming session with peer mentors, NKFM administrators, and the research team. From this session I created a site concept document with site goals and characteristics, personas & scenarios, information architecture, and wireframes. With feedback from this document I significantly scaled back the sites’ features developing a final set of mockups as well as the site’s community guidelines and management plan. The site was built in Drupal by myself and 3 programmers using a modified Agile development process.

Results: 
The site went live to peer mentors and participating young adults on February 20th. Members are actively participating in the site. One member changed dialysis methods based on another member's recommendation. Paper on project will be presented at the 2010 American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium.
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