MindMed

An healthcare app saves millions of elders' life.

An assistant in aiding elders in their daily medication routine, seizing the opportunity resulting from the one-child policy and the population aging condition and making great social impacts.

For whom?

The elderly who require regular medications, such as SSRIs treating depression disorder, Glucophage treating diabetes, and Carbidopa treating Parkinson's disease, etc.

Contribution Summary

End-to-end Design Sprint

Throughout the MVP design & research sprint, several questions and hypotheses I’ve brought up are tested and validated with user research. I quickly iterated the prototypes and based on feedback insights.

Lead 1 Designer and 4 Engineers

Since the application was built from scratch, I led and worked closely with designers and engineers to complete the interactive protoypes and optimize user experience.

Product Scope Management

I initally identifying businiess opportunities and mapped out the key features of this application through fundamental research with the founder.

Key Solutions.

The MindMed, a mobile product that setups, reminds, and tracks daily medications easily. It also allows users to create a medical supporting group involving family member, close friends, and medical care staff to help them mediate and regulate the medication process with collective efforts. The app is especially designed for elder people with practical acessibility considerations, further trying to push the app's usability to the mojority.

One. Easy Medication Setup

David's mom has a hard time to understand and complete any app settings due to limited smart phone knowledge. MindMed helps her autocomplete the most of medication task setup with instruction photo scanning. Now she can setup without comprehend everything on the screen. Easy-peasy!

Two. Supportive Checking Process

Uncle Martin concerns if he takes the right medicines everytime because his prescriptions are in many kinds. It's common for him to get lost and try really hard to read the instruction. Now MindMed keeps his daily medication on the right track with medicine photos and a direct access of calling his son for help.

Three. Collective Group Care

Smith always wants to help his father with his health issues. But his father seldom actively talk about it. Now MindMed can help to create a care group involving everyone who cares about his father. There will always be someone keeping other group members updated. Smith knows more about his father and what he can do to aid in building up a better health condition for him.

Inclusive Deisgn.

Our team started the accessibility design at the very early phase of the MindMed production in order to guarantee its practical usability for the elderly. It's common for them to be experiencing the loss of sensitions at their age. Therefore, we enhanced the visual design elements following the WCAG and provided alternitive device supports to minimize their struggles.

What is the business opportunity?

Scope Determination

To answer this question...

1. Ask Attached Questions:

What difficulties do the elderly have in order to conduct their daily medication consistently?

What are their motivations?

How to supplement based on their current medication habits?

2. Hypothesis:

They would easily forget.

The elderly don't know how to use mobile application for medical assistance.

Their unhealthy conditions prevent them from using technology devices.

3. Research Methods:

User Interviews - research on medication difficulties and demands of the elderly.

Competitive Audits - locate opportunities efficiently; find out pros and cons of current products.

Persona - to create user scenario plots for fund raising.

Research Process

RESEARCH APPROACH DETAILEDS

■ What are the elders' demands overall?

To better understand what difficulties elder people are commonly encountering and their frustrations while using smart devices, I advocated for conducting a series of user interviews to frame their key demands.

We interviewed 8 people who are over 65 years old and currently undergoing long-term regular medications. We found that:

It's common for elder people to lose at least one sensation like hearing or eyesight at their age.
6 out of 8 find themselves that they need a reminder in any kinds to assist their daily medication. They would easily forget to take or have taken their medicines.
Maintaining elder people in a balanced condition is a family business. They would like to remind and help each other to conduct their medication.
Elder people have a passive attitute toward smart devices. They won't learn to use an app unless it's absolute necessary or irreplaceable. Sometimes they rely on other people to teach them how to use apps.

Because of these difficulties, elder people stay far away from powerful assistant applications on smart devices and largely rely on people nearby to regulate their daily medication. Their vulnerability maximizes when staying along.

■ What are the Pros and cons of current products on the market?

I conducted a competitive analysis targeting the existing products to learn how they help people develop and track their daily habits.

I found that:

Motivation is a big challenge. Different apps are using different approaches commonly like text or video rewards. Besides, 3 out of 4 are trying to build a community to improve user's motivation and stickiness.
Accessibility design is limited. Multi-language is not supported in Productive, Fabulous, and Sweat. Font size and color is not user-friendly for people experiencing visual impairment.
Fabulous is absolutely a masterpiece but having a high entry barrier for beginners. A long on-boarding experience and too many attached features would easily block new users.
Reminder and notification are not effective. It's easy to be detached from the daily schedule.

Those obstacles are crucial factors impacting user experience for the elderly. Our app should be as light and acceptable as possible to help users easily complete daily medical tasks.

■ How to draw empathy for the capital raising?

To better guide our design and enable everyone on the team to empathize with our users, I further synthesized the interview results and came up with the following persona and user journey map:

A daily medication reminder built with friends and family connections.

Research to insights

Whether our elder family members admit it or not, they always need someone nearby to mentally and physically support them. They gradually lose the ability to comprehend the world, waiting for other people to understand them and assist in those activities they used to accomplish easily. Their true demands and motivations always root in their family or friend connections.

How might we design as friendly as possible for the elderly?

user painpoint

How might we assist in elder daily medications without nearby supporters?

company opportunity

Design Process

DESIGN APPROACH DETAILEDS

■ how can we balance user demands and business?

Based on the research discoveries and persona, our team determined that the main app function should be a medication reminder for the elderly. Therefore, I hosted a brainstorm session to collect thoughts about two key questions:

How should the medication reminder be conducted for the elderly?
What can motivate the elderly to learn and keep using this app?

Eventually, we were thinking to use check lists to help the elderly recall and guide their medications step by step and include multiple devices providing supplemental supports. We also concluded three key motivators: accessible usability, milestone achievements, and family backbones.

We further created an information architecture diagram to guide our design direction:

■ What does the app will be like?

Our team sketched out fundamental functionalities and possible layouts. We selected the most accessible ones targeting the key motivators after group discussions.

This is the sketch solution we had at that moment.

■ Does the app actually solve the main problems?

Our team further converted sketches into wireframes and developed a low-fi prototype after iterating wireframes for 4 rounds. Then we were ready to conduct the low-fi usability study to evaluate the risk of developing the medication checklist and documentation feature for the elderly. Our usability test partisipants were people beyond the age of 60.

We created an affinity map based on the data we collected from the usability testing:

I found that:

All test participants show great interests in the diary feature to document their health condition history or any relative files.
Most test participants got confused with the achievement feature. They don't think milestone could motivate them to take medication on time and it seemed no necessary.
Some participants said that they felt happy and warm in heart when receiving reminding messages from their family members.
Accessibile visual element design should be enhanced.

■ Clearly, previous assumptions need to be adjusted.

Based on the users' feedback, we abandoned the initial achievement and milestone feature. Therefore, we revised the features that we want to be included in the current phase and design goals that we want to achieve:

■ Consider the accessibility design early on.

We designed the low-fi prototype into a Chinese version to meet accessibility demands of multiple languages and get some feedback. Now, we were ready to enter the hi-fi design phase.

■ The color palette Choice matters.

For the first iteration, my primary design goal is to minimize the confusion and guarantee its accessible usability when elder people are using our product. One of our design strageties is to give users clear optional choices and reduce distractions from other elements at any time so that they know what to do. Besides, I kept reexamining accessibility design guidelines to make sure that our product was right on track.

■ What did the flow mockups look like?

Our team further iterated the hi-fi design for 2 rounds based on the insights concluded from the hi-fi usablity study.

Three Highlights.

One. Prioritize information

The new design rearranges the visual concentration and feed users with the demanding information.

Two. Tapping instead of holding

Simplified gesture interactions for the elderly. Constrained user actions in the audio reply userflow to minimize operating confusions.

Three. Use visual diagrams

New tag classification layout provides users with a statistic chart to summary their medication history.

Evaluation.

Have we achieved our initial goals?

Validation Process

EVALUATION APPROACH DETAILEDS

Most elder participants expressed great satisfactions with the product.

Here's the success metrics summary of the current design performance:

Based on the summary of usability study, I'm happy to see our design had achieved some primary goals that our team determined at the beginning. 5 out of 5 participants could complete their daily medication task within a short time with a clear guidance. And most of them expressed great satisfactions when experience the hi-fi product.

However, the study result indicates that medication task setup and journal tag system navigtaion need more design improvements. Besides, some visual elements require optimization to meet the accissibility satisfaction.

REVIEW THE LATEST FIGMA DOCUMENT

Take advantage of design pattern and mature design system.

Takeaways

The cheapest way to design and develop a product from scratch is to take advantage of existing design systems. I learned what our design system need to cover by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

I found it much easier to design a component following an advanced design principle and guideline comparing to think and test from the basic. Because design system is a collective achievement while studying it is the best way to comprehend how and why some details are concreted like those. The derived design patterns are invaluable experience that I need to keep absorbing through out my career in user experience design.