Sena Bakir
User Experience Designer
MedGenius Healthcare App
Project: Personalized Health Application
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Project Date: 15/11/2020
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Skills: Persona & wireframe creation, User testing, Digital prototype,
Affinity diagraming, Design research, Mobile UI
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Team: Leah Raftis, Nicole Visentin, Aggi Anand, Hatice Sena Bakir
Leah Raftis focused on the Overview and Problem definition
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Nicole Visentin focused on Digital Prototype
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Aggi Anand focused on Secondary Research
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Hatice Sena Bakir focused on Persona Creation and Low Fidelity Wireframe
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We all worked on UCD Process, Early User Observation, Affinity Diagram and As-Is Scenario together as a team.
Overview
Taking one or more medications daily could be hard to manage for most of the people who are taking prescription medication. Our team researched and designed a mobile app that helps people understand and manage their own personal health. Our user experience design challenge was to test usability of a mobile App on a certain group of people who are taking more than one medication daily. This is a group project that led us to discover multiple pain points and design an experience.
The Problem Definition
About half of the Canadians take one or more prescription medication. Among patients with chronic disease, 37% take four or more prescription medications. 10% of patients with two or more chronic diseases report experiencing medication error.
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These medication errors include:
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Taking wrong dose, mixing incompatible medications
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taking medications at the wrong time,
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confusing one medication for another,
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misunderstanding or forgetting the instructions provided by the pharmacy.
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How might we help patients decrease their rates of at-home medication errors while managing chronic health conditions?
Early User Observation
We wanted to find out if technology has the potential to simplify home medication management and help chronically ill people live safer and better lives. We applied Human-Centred Design methods and design thinking processes that IDEO uses to solve design problems.
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To better understand the common pain points for our users, we wrote down all our key observations from our interviews on sticky notes.
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The questions emerged out in the early user observation are; What are the challenges of taking more than one medication daily?, How would be the design, in order to use an effective and accessible app?
Persona Development
Due to the Covid-19 situation, our recruitment strategy is based on personal connections.
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We used:
- 1:1 in-person interviews
- 1:1 interviews made via Zoom
- 1:1 interviews made via Phone
- Email and phone follow-up
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The biggest challenge was not being able to conduct our interviews in person.
Secondary Research
Some of the challenges of taking several medications are; Taking medication at the right time and day, worrying about medication safety and efficacy, making dosage errors and experiencing medication interaction issues.
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Opportunties in planning: Prevalent features of mobile apps for medication management can be Medication reminder, Track symptoms, vitals, Shares data and reports, Synchronization Education Novel and rare features of mobile apps for medication management can be Identifying medications and drug interactions, Data entry other than typing, Warning if dosage exceeded.
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The next steps are synthesizing our research and diving deeper into empathizing with the users’ pain points. Also, Identifying and focusing on key areas to improve the experience for our users.
Affinity Diagram
Our participants are concerned about forgetting their medication intake time and some are concerned with taking the wrong dosage by mistake.
Their current reminder methods are unreliable and fail to meet their needs. They often have additional medication requirements that their alarms do not remind them of.
As-Is Scenario
Low-Fidelity Wireframe
Digital Prototype
The Digital prototype is created based on the user’s need using Adobe XD tool. It has the minimum number of pages and optimum numbers of actions in order to make the mobile app accessible and effective to use.
Next Steps
This phase has further impressed that our users are keen to find safer and easier ways to manage their at-home medications, but also that solutions will require a fine balance of user control and simplicity of use. The medication input process is particularly challenging for users. As we develop further prototypes, the team will investigate ways to simplify and automate this process. We will focus on user testing which allow us to collect feedback on recommended solution.