wearable medical device App
ABOUT THIS PROJECt
This was not a freelance project - it was part of my day job. It's included here to illustrate my capabilities.
The client is a start-up in the medical device field. They are developing a wearable with embedded sensors that take a “scan” of the body’s main organs and (using their proprietary algorithm) determine whether or not each of your body’s main systems is in balance, under-active, or over-active. The goal of this project was to design a native mobile app that captured the scans and presented the results to the user along with recommendations about what they could do to acheive balance.
WHAT I DID ON THIS PROJECT
I was the User Experience Designer on the project and was also responsible for Visual Design. I also co-facilitated a week-long design thinking workshop (Google Design Sprint process) with the CEO, their chief medical professional and other stakeholders. Based on the outcome of the workshop, I created a high fidelity prototype which included an onboarding flow, the scanning process, and a dashboard of the body system scans. I then conducted usability testing to ensure that users understood how it all worked, that the results of the scans made sense to them, and that they could easily access the recommendations that the system made for them. The testing surfaced some friction points (yeah! that’s what we were looking for) which we we able to address by tweaking the prototype in between testing sessions. Further testing proved that we had eliminated those friction points.
WHAT I LEARNED ON THIS PROJECT
As a user advocate, I spend much of my time trying to make sure that things just make sense to users. This can be very challenging with a client whose stakeholders include scientists, engineers or medical professionals. Designing infographics can take much longer than people expect, because the amount of information that these type of stakeholders want to dump on a user at one time is astounding. They don’t understand that the greatest obstacle for communication is the illusion of it. They believe they’re “sending” all the right information to the user - and they think it should be obvious to the user what it means. Clients often fail to realize that communication (like beauty) is in the eye (or mind) of the beholder. This is why you need to build in lots of time for iteration.