Navishealth

Medication Reminder App Design

Project Overview:

Designed a mobile app with medication adherence and caretaker functions. App helps patients incorporate new medication into their current routine by easily setting reminders for their new prescribed medications. 

 

Internship

Client: NavisHealth

Duration: Two Months

Teammates:  Shanna, Calvin, Maivi

Programs used: Illustrator, Sketch

UX/UI Designer:

  • User Research
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Survey
  • User Flows
  • Wireframing
  • Usability testing
 
 

Learned:

  • Better understanding of habit forming design and how to use it in more than a theoretical sense.
  • Not to underestimate the complexity of the problem. In the beginning I incorrectly believed a medical adherence app would be relatively simple to create.

Challenges:

  • Identifying who the real users are. Required extensive research into age and occupations of prospective users.
  • Incorporating habit forming design efficiently. Identified four points of the Hook: Trigger, Action, Reward, Investment.
 
THE PROCESS.png
 

DISCOVER

The Client

NavisHealth is a Silicon Valley, digital health IT solutions company. They serve acute care hospitals and healthcare organizations of all sizes, throughout the US. Fusing their expertise in leading-edge technology with clinical operations, we deliver the cutting-edge healthcare solutions that our customers need.

 
navishealth logo 1
 

Research

We began with user-research, interviews, surveys, and competitive analysis to debunk our assumptions and focus on the biggest pain point for our users. Through our research, we were able to disprove our assumption that “only elderly people take medication”.  We found that a large percentage of people who take prescribed medication are aged 45-65+.

During our research, we uncovered the “caregiver” component to medication adherence.  Here, we are defining “caregiver” as anyone who oversees another person’s health and medication.  This includes family members, friends, or professionals.

65.7 million people in the US provide care to someone who is ill, disabled, or aged.  That’s almost ⅓ of the the entire adult population in America.  (https://www.caregiver.org/selected-caregiver-statistics)

Caregivers are most receptive to technologies that help them deliver, monitor, track, or coordinate their loved one's medical care. Plus, caregivers are more technologically savvy than the general population.

 

We initially split our user group by age but found that our app would work for all age groups and demographics because we found nothing definitive that proved age groups had any significant bearing on how the apps are used.

2,002 adults surveyed.  64% (1,281) are smartphone users.  

18-29 - 448 =35%

30-49 - 410 =32%

50-64 - 282 =22%

65+ - 141 =11% 

 

Competitive Analysis

With competitive analysis we came to a better understanding of what methods apps were using already, and find what we believed worked and what didn't. We tried using them ourselves, looking for potential issues.

We looked at:

  • How did they present the reminders?
  • daily, weekly, monthly?
  • AM/PM or morning, afternoon, evening, night? 
  • Did they give medical instructions?
  • Was there an option for caretakers?
  • Did they have a tutorial?
  • Do they show things as a pillbox, a calendar, or a list?
 

Personas

James, 40, is a caretaker.  He has a wife and son but acts as the sole caretaker for his mother, Josephine, who is prescribed a variety of medications. While Patricia, 50, is the principal for Southside Middle School and a dog lover.  She is a diabetic and wants to remain healthy for her students and her pets.


DEFINE

Through stakeholder meetings and user research we found a few major pain points:

  • Understanding their medications
  • Motivation
  • Problem isn’t forgetting meds, it’s that they don’t have it in their routine yet

DEVELOP

 

Sketching and paper prototypes

Once we honed in on the problem we were looking to solve, we began to sketch concepts and ideas.  We used this as a starting place for our design iterations.  

Card sorting helped feed into the entire information architecture of our app. We spoke to users face-to-face and through surveys to find out what they thought was most important and sketched accordingly.

 

MOCKUPS

 
 

After several rounds of design iteration and testing, we designed an app that would increase medical adherence by helping to create new habits by way of our app’s user flow and by associating new medications with daily routines as indicated by iconography.