CHALLENGE
How do we address daily concerns faced by people treated with diabetes: monitoring diet, logging blood glucose levels, syncing devices AND pass that info to your doctor?
OUTCOME
We created Gluci-Chek, a free mobile application designed to help patients calculate nutritional intake, keep a self-monitoring blood glucose diary with data visualization of blood glucose results, sync the data with external devices such as meters and insulin injection devices via bluetooth, and provide a real-time data transfer to their healthcare professional.
Re-imagining health by embodying empathy
Client
ROCHEDiabetes
UXD + Visual Direction
Early on in our project, our client expressed the desire to move away from the clinical look most often associated with medical apps in the market, as well as to simplify the UX as compared to the competitive apps in the market.
Our approach was to create a lifestyle-based look & feel which would be fun to look at and easy to use.
Our UXD was based on short user flows and minimized number of taps to complete the most necessary tasks and our design direction included rich colour palette, elaborate custom-made iconography and animated micro-interactions.
Custom illustration
Custom illustrations establish the solid foundation of originality and artistic harmony. In the world of tight competition, it’s vital to stand out. The vast majority of people perceive images faster than words. That’s neither good nor bad - it’s just a fact that designers can use this approach to increase the visual performance of web or mobile app.
Motion Design
We strive to have our animations use soft, fluid motions. We aim for a balance between fun and sophisticated aesthetic. We convey simple movements to clarify compositions and clearly expresses its intention. However, it is important to bear in mind that each decision was guided by the following principles, simple, consistent, dynamic and, smart.
The Project
Creating GluciChek diabetes management app lasted about 2 years, from the project start to app launch.
During the life of the project, we collaborated heavily with the ROCHE research and business units, making sure our project aligns with the business strategy while ensuring it serves the user needs.
1: Empathize & Define
Research With Empathy
Prior to the start of this project, Roche's research team had already done some studies on how patients with diabetes manage their day-to-day. We joined their team and the knowledge they shared served as a jump-off point for the start of our project.
During the following 6 months our joint team conducted numerous phone-based interviews with user-patients from Europe and the US and tried to fully immerse ourselves in their experiences. This helped us further refine our understanding of the users and their needs and helped us eliminate assumptions.
The outcome of this collaborative phase was the creation of archetypes, which armed us with immense knowledge of our end user behaviour, motivations and pain points.
Later on in the process it was decided that in order to make a technically feasible and financially viable product, our focus had to be aimed at supporting the needs of 2 archetypes: the Struggler and the Optimizer.
2: Challenges & Pain Points
Defining concrete actions based on user journeys
During our user research phase, we realized that there is a subset to each archetype - patients who observe religious holidays which include fasting.
One of the most interesting aspects of a complex user journey was how to support patients who are observing Ramadan, and how do we meet their needs during fasting, when observing means no food from sunrise to sunset.
We were lucky to have Roche set up interviews with diabetes patients who also observe ramadan who shared their journeys of managing diabetes while observing religious holidays. In addition to this, we recruited a small group of HCPs for collaborative sessions in Toronto, who shared their POV's on doctor-patient journeys.
2: Convergent + Divergent Thinking
Following the Google's 5-day Design Sprint format, using rapid-prototyping we would test out few hypothesis with small number of users
Start with multiple possibilities to arrive to the one solution
