PAR, Inc. builds the evaluation tools that licensed psychologists and mental health professionals rely on every day—rigorous, research-backed instruments used to measure how people think, learn, and process the world around them. One of their flagship products is the RIAS-2, a trusted, decades-old assessment of verbal and nonverbal intelligence used with clients from young children to older adults.
On paper, PAR's position was strong. The instrument was rigorous, the science was sound, and psychologists trusted the brand. But the market was moving. Clinicians now expect modern, digital tools, and the RIAS-2 still lived in stimulus books, printed forms, and stopwatches. Every day it stayed on paper was a day a loyal customer might be tempted to look elsewhere.
The challenge wasn't the science. It was the experience around it.
Discovery
We kicked off by studying both the instrument itself and the competitive landscape that prompted the project.
The catalyst was competitive. A rival's digital offering was capturing market share, and PAR's loyalists were being asked to choose between the instrument they trusted and the convenience they wanted—a choice PAR never wanted them to have to make.
Two goals emerged. The first was parity: a modern, digital RIAS-2 that gave loyal clinicians easy access to a current tool without leaving the brand they already relied on. The second was to go a step further—to study the friction clinicians had run into with the competing product and design past it. Two themes surfaced repeatedly: ease of use, and availability and reliability. Get those right, and the tool could win clinicians back on its own merits.
The paper process itself pointed to exactly where a "smart" digital form could earn its keep. Manual administration left room for human error around the RIAS-2's basal, reverse, and end rules. Scoring meant tallying by hand before a report could even be submitted. Valuable item-level data—the kind that could power future research, error analysis, and behavioral observation—was simply never captured. And any digital replacement had to stay flexible enough to run on tablets and desktops without special hardware or peripheral connections. These weren't cosmetic gaps; they were the daily tax of a paper workflow, and they became the project's north stars.
We also confirmed the real constraints. PAR's existing architecture was highly configurable—an asset for flexibility—but its look and feel had aged. We also had to design tablet-first, then desktop: clinicians typically administer the RIAS-2 on a business tablet that gets handed to the client mid-session, which created the unique challenge of building a seamless experience that works fluidly for both the clinician and the client passing the device between them. And the deeper challenge wasn't technical at all. It was behavioral: clinicians carried years of paper muscle memory, and moving them from a paper mindset to a digital one would take more than a working interface. Underneath it all was a bigger ambition—PAR didn't want a one-off, but a Digital Record Form that could scale across their broader catalog. This project needed to be a blueprint, not a dead end.
How We Did It
Digitizing a clinical assessment is deceptively hard. The instrument is standardized and can't be altered—the science depends on administering it exactly as validated. The real difficulty is understanding the manual workflow around it: the practiced sequence of flipping stimulus books, marking forms by hand, and timing tasks with a stopwatch. Clinicians grow so accustomed to these steps that the pain points become invisible, part of the routine. To design past them, we needed to see the assessment administered firsthand and map every user flow—identifying exactly where automation or a smoother experience could do the heavy lifting.
Our process:
- First, we conducted user interviews to understand the clinician's current manual workflow.
- Then we produced user flow diagrams with the PAR team to identify gaps and pain points in that workflow.
- Next, we ran user testing with both clinicians and non-clinicians, presenting wireframes that walked through the full journey—from creating an assessment all the way through generating a report—so we could act on tactical feedback.
- Finally, after refining those wireframes into pixel-perfect Figma designs through internal feedback sessions, we were ready to hand off to development.
The build itself meant translating the complex, rule-based nature of performance testing into a fluid digital experience. We developed end-to-end assessment workflow management—from pre-assessment launch, through a range of response types (multiple choice, free response, verbal-with-grid, and booklet responses), all the way to post-assessment report submission. Underneath the interface sat the "intelligence" that made the form smart: built-in logic to handle age-based start points and to advance clinicians through subtests according to the RIAS-2's specific administration rules, with prototyping and user testing woven through the process to keep it intuitive.
We worked as an embedded, Agile partner throughout. The team ran on a structured sprint cadence with consistent status updates, weekly time tracking, and periodic refinements to scope and budget as the work evolved, all coordinated through a shared Microsoft Teams workspace. The tool was built on a Bootstrap UI framework, chosen for the flexibility it gave a brand-new product design.
Impact
The first iteration of the digital RIAS-2 launched in May 2025. By design, the rollout has been a deliberate slow roll—conceived as a soft launch to gather feedback methodically from existing clinicians, and timed against the school slow season, when summer break means little testing activity.
That quiet has been a feature, not a bug. A calm entry gave PAR room to listen carefully instead of managing a flood, and a feedback survey is helping structure what they hear. Early signals point to general satisfaction from the clinicians using it.
The more durable outcome is strategic. PAR now has a trusted paper instrument delivered as a modern digital experience—meeting the parity goal that started the project, targeting the competition's exact pain points, and giving loyalists a clear reason to stay. For clinicians, the automation of basal, reverse, and end rules and of scoring calculations transformed a labor-intensive, error-prone chore into an efficient, more accurate clinical task. For PAR's customers, the DRF unlocked both remote and in-person administration, meeting the flexibility that institutional and virtual learning environments increasingly demand.
And the partnership hasn't stopped at launch: Scenic West has continued to roll out modernizing features like offline assessments and ongoing usability enhancements for PAR's clinicians. Because the work was built for reuse, PAR also walks away with an adaptable foundation—one that has already paved the way for digital record forms across other assessments in their portfolio.
