An eight-lesson program for life after cancer treatment

Web app

FoRtitude is a program for breast cancer survivors living with the fear that their cancer comes back, built for a clinical study at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. Eight lessons, each in three parts, with a practice tool behind every one.

The people using it are managing a real fear on an ordinary Tuesday, often on a phone. So it had to open where they left off, never shame anyone for being away a week, and carry the study team's words exactly as they wrote them. It is one of several studies and research centers I have built for.

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RoleDesign and build

Program8 lessons, 3 parts each

Built forA clinical study at UNC Gillings

The program

Eight lessons, and you can stop anywhere

Every lesson is the same three parts: learn it, practice it, apply it. The home screen marks what's done, what's in progress and what's waiting, and each part is short enough to finish in one sitting. Somebody who has twenty minutes on a Tuesday can use them without losing their place.

The lesson list beside the Relaxation card, marked in progress, with its three parts: learn, practice and apply

Today

Pick a few, get one guided path

Choosing what to do next is work, and this program asks for it on a day somebody may not have much left. So Today takes the lessons they picked and chains them into one route with a next button, instead of sending them back to a menu after every step.

The Your Today screen with three chosen lessons in one routine, relaxation, thought traps and worry practice, each with its minutes, and a Begin routine button

The tools

A tool behind every lesson

Worry practice schedules the worrying and then closes it down. The thought record walks through a situation, the automatic thought and the alternative. The relaxation tool plays guided audio. They're the part a participant actually uses between sessions, so each one is a real screen, not a handout. The chapter list beside it ticks off what they have already been through.

The worry practice tool explaining how a scheduled worry session works, with the lesson's chapters listed beside it

Onboarding

Your reasons, in your order

The last step of signing up asks what somebody wants out of this and lets them put their reasons in their own order, dragging them up and down the list. It takes a minute, and it means the program opens on what they came for, not on what the study considers lesson one.

The Shape your journey step with four goals a participant can reorder, from feeling better by changing how I think to feeling connected to other survivors

Worth keeping

Save the line, not the whole lesson

A heart sits beside every passage. Tap it and that sentence is kept, with a note about why if somebody wants one, and the dialog says plainly how to take it back again. People remember one line from a session, and this is where that line goes.

A chapter of the relaxation lesson, a video above a passage about the body's stress tools, with a small heart at the end of the paragraph

Three weeks later

The lines worth keeping, on one page

Gems collects the short, usable pieces out of all eight lessons, so somebody three weeks past a session can find the one sentence that helped without re-reading the lesson. Anything they mark as a favorite goes to its own page with the note they added about why.

The Gems page listing short takeaways from across the lessons, each one expandable

Under the hood

The words are the study's, exactly

A clinical program is only valid if its text is what was approved. Automated checks fail the build when a heading or a chapter link drifts from the source document, so a rewrite cannot slip in by accident.

Pictures chosen for the people using it

Real photographs, no stock gestures of triumph, and people who look like the women in the study, not a decade younger.

One scale, every screen size

The whole interface sizes from a single formula and switches between top and bottom navigation at tablet width, so a phone gets the whole program, not a cut-down one.