Create Medication Tracking Mobile App with AI Chat
Opportunity
Our pharmaceutical client wanted to develop a mobile app to improve medication adherence for patients using patch treatments. They wanted an app designed to provide valuable insights into how patients were using the medication, while also offering quick access to information through a Natural Language Model (NLM) Chatbot.
Skills Used
User Research | Workshop Facilitation | User Persona Definitions | Mobile App Design
The Story
This digital health coach app was created for Parkinson's disease (PD) patients and caregivers to help them keep track of their medication records, get quick easy access to information on PD and track their overall health.
This app was in beta testing and due to non-disclosure agreements some elements have been blurred and medication tracking screens have been omitted.
My role: Visual Designer, User Experience Designer
Platform: iOS, Android
Background
The primary goals for this project are to provide insights to the pharmaceutical company on how patients are using the medication, increase the length of time patients are on the medication and increase medication adherence.
My role as the visual designer was to brand the app using Next IT's core conversational user interface (UI) in accordance with the client's brand standards and provide the necessary specs and assets to the development team.
As the user experience designer, my role was to help the team understand the nuances of this patient population and to guide development decisions through user flows and mockups.
Onboarding screens used to introduce users to the main features of the app.
Discovery & Research
Tasks performed:
Client and Market Research: Studied the client's brand standards, market research, websites about living with Parkinson's, client's marketing materials and patient medication brochures
Competitor Research: Researched other medication tracking apps, took notes and screenshots of user interfaces and key experiences
Research Presentation: Presented key findings from my research to the project team
User Personas: Created two user personas based on the research and shared and discussed them with the team
One of my first steps in this project was to understand the disease state and patient population. What is Parkinson's? How does it effect a person's day-to-day life? What effects of the disease will impact the design and experience decisions that need to be made? What other apps are patients using to manage their PD?
One of the two patient user personas created
Ideation
Tasks performed:
Research and user flows for user registration
Journey mapping sessions to explore patient/caregiver profile setup
For this project we needed to build out an account registration process as well as a profile setup flow. We knew this was a lot for any user to take on but especially for this patient population with their dexterity and cognitive impairments. With the product owner and development team we mapped out the flow from app download to account registration to profile setup and through the discussion came up with business and backend requirements.
Visual Design
Tasks performed:
Designed color theme style guide based on core conversation UI design and client's brand standards
Art directed the app icon design
Designed avatar image
Designed new screen layouts that were not included in the core UI design including launch screen, onboarding screens and multi-purpose forms
The baseline design for this app comes from Next IT's core conversation UI screen layouts, which were designed for efficient iOS implementations, allowing for easy "theming" for each iteration. However, each client project has it's own nuances and new screens and features still needed to be designed and developed. We also needed to design the app icon and the avatar image for the digital health coach.
Android Platform Addition
Midway through this project the Android platform was requested to be supported. In order to support this, I evaluated the layouts and modified the designs to fit better within the Android and Material Design paradigm. New screen designs, specs and assets were created and provided to the Android developers.
Iconography
Log Entry Icons
An icon set specific to medication tracking needed to be created to aide in visual recognition of log entry types.
Menu Icons
Some of the menu icons were already created as part of the core UI (Feedback, Settings and Sign Out) but new icons specific to this iteration of the app needed to be created.
Design/Dev Collaboration
Tasks performed:
Assets and specs for all screens and features for both iOS and Android platforms
Extensive collaboration to implement SVGs as a scalable approach to complex medication tracking that is handled on the backend server
Whiteboard sketching in refinement meetings to assist in solution explorations
The development team and myself had great communication and collaboration. Some of the tasks we performed together were simple such as the color theming of the app but when we introduced the idea of using SVGs for our medication tracking feature things got more complicated. We had a lot of back and forth trying out different settings for SVGs files. The devs on this project were phenomenal and not afraid to get their hands "dirty" and download Illustrator to help as we explored this new territory.
I found Agile refinement meetings as a great opportunity to share wireframes and flows with the dev team to discuss the feasibility and level-of-effort so that changes can be made to the designs and flows before work was put into a sprint. We used whiteboard sketches frequently in our refinement sessions and planning meetings to explore ideas and make sure we were all in alignment with the solution we were discussing. This was very valuable to the project.
Results
The app began its beta testing phase in early May 2018. I was excited to get data and determine the next steps. I was eager to understand the number of patients verse caregivers who used the app. Were they more likely to track their medication conversationally or through the log? What questions do they have about PD? What questions will they ask about the medication? Will they track daily or sporadically? I couldn’t wait to find out. Sadly, I left the company before the beta testing was completed.
Reflections
In hindsight, I wonder if we had designed the core conversational app UI to be more platform agnostic instead of leaning so heavily on the iOS defaults, would we have saved ourselves time overall when it came down to implementing the UI on the Android platform?
This project had many changes along its path including the addition of different user types such as people who are not prescribed the medication and people who are caregivers of patients. These user types were not researched or documented along the way and would need to be in the future to help guide future development decisions.
This project created a great learning opportunity for me to understand the Android platform better.