App-o-plexy: Making an app; how hard can it be?

It’s coming up on one year since we jumped into the speech therapy app development business. It seems like forever and a short time ago that we decided we could take our years of speech-language experience and convert it into an app for the iPad. After all, how hard could it be? Well, like a lot of journeys this one was easy to start and required discipline and persistence to complete.

We got our first iPad several months after Apple’s 2010 releas and noticed right away how captivated kids were by it. Motivating kids to stay on task is challenging at times, and we found that the iPad is a great tool to modify behavior and work on language skills. The early apps we found for speech therapy were OK but, we thought we could improve on what existed.

We drafted the initial concept for SLP Minimal Pairs on a single sheet of paper and started explaining it to people we thought could help build it. Our illustrator has a family with young children. So, he has a natural opportunity to test each illustration as he works. Our software engineer also has young children. So he was attuned to what kids like and what wouldn’t work. We, and our clinical staff have many years of working with pediatric clients in private practice as well as in public school settings. So, we know the demands and differences of both.

We wanted our app to be easy to navigate, so therapists could easily switch-on-the fly from a breakthrough moment to a reinforcing drill while in session. We also wanted to capture performance metrics as painlessly as possible while maintaining session control with the child. Many apps at the time were too easy for kids to grab control of. So, we built our control panel close to the therapist, making it harder for kids to disrupt the session.

We wanted the words we used to be real, meaningful, easily illustrated and recognizable to children as young as 2 or 3. We only wanted to use pairs in which both words of the pair would be recognizable to a child.  This limited the number of words in some of the processes, but age appropriateness and clarity was important.  In our next app we will increase the number of words because we won’t need pairs.

Organizing and controlling the production of each part of the app got complicated fast. Our team works remotely. Which means there is no central office, only the workspace of a distant server to store and control all the parts of the app. Voice samples of each word were recorded and cataloged. Illustrations for each word were created, tested, edited and approved through the workspace. The control and flow of the app went through more than a dozen drafts and revisions. Our first release took twice as long as originally planned, and we just released our third version of SLP Minimal Pairs.

We have learned many lessons along the trail of our first speech therapy app, the most notable lesson being the importance of patience and trust within a team. We are fortunate to have the talents of some very gifted and giving members on ours. The second lesson is the importance of testing. Some of our testers became early customers, and their feedback and issue discoveries have been invaluable. The third lesson has been the willingness to stay open to criticism. Every review is not a glowing report, and some people show more tact than others in expressing their opinion. But there’s a grain of truth in every contact. The challenge lies in hearing it. We’d like to hear from you.