End-to-end design process of improving the health tracker (NDA)

Overview

To improve patients’ experiences with symptom management and engagement with the health tracker, the team conducted user research to identify user needs, concept-tested prototypes, and delivered a high-fidelity prototype to the leaders and multiple stakeholders.

With COVID-19, the team was working remotely as an international, cross-functional team with each of us in different time zones. I was also flying around being in the US and my hometown Korea, making the project more dynamic.

Impact

• Delivered research findings and 4 major feature recommendations to leaders and multiple stakeholders, including CEO, product team, and designers.
• Evangelized the impact of research through adaptation of design framework throughout the research process.
• Received strong positive feedbacks from the stakeholders, and recommendations aligned with company’s future milestones.

Research Question

“How might we increase patient engagement with health tracker?”

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The Design Process

Unfolding the Research through Design Framework

Part of our team’s mission was to evangelize the impact of research as the company lacked a dedicated research team. We incorporated the Double Diamond design framework to help us guide our research focus by better framing the problem and solving the users’ underlying needs.

This case study will unfold along with the different stages of the Double Diamond.

The Ideal Double Diamond

but the Reality…

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User Research

Please note that below are summarized insights our team had during the user research process.

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1. Discover

• We initiated our research with a general survey sent out online (n=72) to understand the general space of health care and health trackers. It helped us identify people’s health goals and tracking habits.
• From the general survey results, we devised a remote moderated interview plan to better understand what it feels like to undergo cancer treatments and how they manage their symptoms.
• From the interview with cancer patients and survivors, affinity mapping helped us categorize their responses into various sections, such as their emotions throughout the oncology journey, how they track and manage their symptoms, interaction with the care team and caregivers, and so on.

Key Insights

Interview with the patients and survivors shed light to clearly understand not just how they manage their symptoms, but empathize with their adjusted lifestyles and daily challenges.

• Through quantitative analysis of the self-reported metrics, I identified that “older people’s self perception of health level is higher than that of younger people”
• Cancer oncology treatments were perceived as long “journeys” even sometimes with no end.
• Symptom management varies by each individual, severity, and cancer types. As a researcher and designer, another design challenge was how we can deliver a solution that addresses all cancer types and patients.

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2. Define

Below are only partial insights synthesized.

💡 Key Insight:

• Identifying the user needs and listing out the stories in a prioritized order immensely helped the team properly guide to the next steps.

• We synthesized potential features that would address the user needs.

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3. Develop

💡 Key Insights:

• With my background in data visualization, I was particularly fascinated in developing visual dashboards and data visualization to help patients track their symptoms.

• One key lesson I learned was: Designing should always consider the target audience first.

  • Excited to develop data visualization screens, I initially thought that the more diverse, interactive, and comprehensive graphs are, the better.
  • Nevertheless, during the expert evaluation and concept-testing, I realized that the screens were simply too busy and users (particularly the old population that are less tech savvy) find the visuals to be too complicated and less informative.

3.1. Concept-testing

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4. Deliver (Design Recommendations)

** Disclaimer: Below displays only 2 of the total 4 final design recommendations **

In order to ensure that our design solutions stem to delivering the actual user needs, we explicitly stated the user needs that are being met with each design recommendation.

** 4.1. Dashboard and Data Visualization**

Personalized dashboard provides a way to effectively track users’ past symptoms and even compare and predict how they would feel in the next few days.

** 4.2. Journal**

Journal feature lets users record their symptoms through various means. Considering accessibility and finger “tickling” & “numbness” being a common symptom of cancer, we include voice memo, photo upload, and emotion scale to faciliate their input.

To learn more about this project, please reach out to me!

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Reflections

1. Interviewing cancer patients could be overwhelming at first. I thought I needed to know all the terminologies, the process that patients go through, treatment cycles, and so on. Acknowledging that I am “learning” from them at the beginning of user sessions not only helped lighten the atmosphere but also gave patients more confidence to share their stories.

2. Always think who the users are: When I was ideating and designing features for dashboard and data visualization, my initial thought was having comprehensive data and being able to interactively manipulate the data was the best way to go. However, it turned out that I was not thinking about the patients who would be the actual users for the new features.

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