Doodle Health is a game that uses the interface of Draw Something to crowd source medical iconography from different cultural communities.
For this project I was in charge of the user experience, user interface, and the front-end coding in HTML5 and CSS.
The Principal Investigators of the initial project enlisted the help of The GApp Lab because they had found in preliminary research that iconography of any kind can be very culturally biased. My favorite story was when showed a simple picture of a person covered in red dots standing next to a chicken, a Polynesian community member questioned “Why did the chicken attack that guy?”. Chicken Pox, the PI’s quickly learned, is only called Chicken Pox in English, so having that kind of icon didn’t make sense to the different cultural groups.
The User Experience of this project was fairly straightforward:
Had to be accessible on any device, computer, phone, or otherwise
Had to be lightweight, couldn’t require external plugins or have huge tech requirements
Readable at a 2nd Grade reading level