BACKGROUND
Type 1 diabetes is managed through monitoring blood sugar, insulin levels, diet and exercise. The challenge is that it’s often not possible to know precisely how much insulin to take. The amount is based on many factors, such as food, exercise, and overall emotional and physical health. These factors fluctuate greatly throughout every day, making selecting dosage a complicated balancing act.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
How might we help newly diagnosed Type 1 patients who lack the means for real-time insulin management live as freely as possible?
TARGET AUDIENCE
- Newly diagnosed Type 1 diabetics
- Smartphone and technology savvy, 13-40 yrs
Limited financial / governmental access to expensive new technologies i.e. give themselves insulin injections, not on insulin pump / CGM
MY ROLE
User Research, Interaction Design, Branding, Visual Design and UI Design
Project Duration: 80 hours
PROCESS
UNDERSTAND
Competitive Analysis
Market Research
Expert and User Interviews
DEFINE
Product Roadmap
Storyboards
User Persona
User Flows
IDEATE
Wireframes
Prototypes
User Testing
VISUAL DESIGN
Style Guide
Logo and Icon Design
Key Screen Templates
UNDERSTAND
I needed to:
- Conduct a discovery phase with subject matter experts to gain industry insight, understand product line potential, and identify key areas of focus for user research.
- Conduct user research to identify usage trends, priorities from the user’s perspective, knowledge gaps, and opportunities for design enhancements related to product desirability.
I spoke to:
- Three Type 1 diabetics
- Three diabetes experts (1 endocrinologist, 1 diabetes researcher and 1 dietician)
“I hate carrying a ton of equipment.”
“I used to record my information in an Excel sheet before I got a pump.”
“Doctors rely on patients’ self-monitoring. It’s hard to adjust medication otherwise.”
“Monitoring BG is costly - test strips and lancets aren’t cheap.”
DEFINE
Due to the outstanding pain points of the time consuming logging process (recording blood glucose levels 7 times a day) and cost of devices, we decided to define our persona as Sylvia, a busy university student with limited financial support. In order to step into Sylvia's shoes, we also storyboarded a typical day in Sylvia's life to discover daily obstacles and frustrations.
Persona for target audience for the diabetes app:
Storyboard for a day in the life of Sylvia the Go-getter:
After we completed the storyboard and persona, we found the key pain points are:
- Tedious multiple logs daily: blood glucose check, carb count, insulin calculation and administration, followed by blood glucose check after the meal and logging of data.
- Lots of equipment: Meter, test strips, insulin pen, lancets, mobile phone, and notebook. Switching from device to device also adds to the time spent, hampers her active lifestyle.
Keeping these insights in mind, we developed a user flow showing the process from on-boarding to log creation to analysis of data.
IDEATE
Sketches were worked with the following in mind:
- Minimize manual entry of data by syncing up data from devices
- Remember previous entries for reuse
- Auto-filling of data from pre-existing databases
"New Entry" page explorations:
Sketches for the full "Creating New Entry" user flow:
Corresponding Wireframes:
A prototype was created in Invision using these wireframe screens, and tested with the Type 1 diabetics interviewed in the Understand phase.
Some minor issues were discovered after the usability tests. Some participants felt that the logbook screen was getting too long to scroll through with the collapse / expand feature. Some also felt that the graphs page wasn't as intuitive as it could be. Finally, it was expressed that the instructions for the onboarding section could be clearer to indicate that devices not relevant to the specific user could be skipped.
“The graphs are a bit confusing, what do these dots represent?”
“The page gets very long when I expand and collapse the days”
“What if I don’t have a pump?”
Proposed revisions for concerns raised:
VISUAL DESIGN
dia: day (spanish)
Living with diabetes is a tedious process of recording lots of data daily. Dia is here to help you live as spontaneous and active a life you can. We want to help you get your data recorded and your condition managed in as streamlined and pleasant a manner as possible.
Assertive | Clean | Direct | Cheerful
From the feedback received during the usability tests we improved the prototype screens that the participants were struggling with, and then created the final screen designs for dia.
OUTCOME
Based upon feedback from a final round of usability tests, potential users found dia easy to understand and use, and appreciated the time saving features.
“An eight-year old would be able to understand it”
“It’s very intuitive and clear”
“I like how it combines the food database feature from MyFitnessPal so I don’t have to switch apps”
CONCLUSION
Diabetes is an extremely broad topic and there were lots of issues that could potentially be addressed, including increasing overall awareness and education and building a better community for diabetics. I chose to focus on the most pressing, everyday problem of making recording and sharing of data as streamlined as pleasant as possible, but would love to explore these other issues in further versions of Dia.
In my home country of Singapore, our Prime Minister focused on diabetes at the recent National Day Rally, highlighting that 1 in 9 Singaporeans have diabetes. I would also explore taking this app further to see how it can be more helpful specifically in our country, especially in the context of our local dietary and exercise habits.