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Overview
Uppermed
Kidney failure is a difficult disease for patients to manage. To help patients with their peritoneal dialysis (PD) treatments, the Uppermed app was made. Uppermed tracks treatments via data recording and trend analysis and encourages patients to have a consistent treatment schedule. I was responsible for the UX design of the entire treatment tracking app.
Problem
Over 1,000,000 kidney failure patients are found to be depressed and have trouble sticking to consistent treatment regiments. In addition, PD patients need to write down their inflow volume and outflow volume 4 times a day. These processes are time consuming, laborious, and defeating.
Team
Startup CEO, 2 developers
6 / 2020 - 8 / 2020 (2 months)
User research
Prototype
Visual design
Figma
How might we make kidney failure easier to manage for patients struggling with the disease every day?
Goal
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Record patient's body liquid balance, blood pressure and body weight.
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Track patient's treatment progress.
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Communicate with doctor and nurse easily.
Research
I started by sending out questionnaires on the PD Facebook group, which had 124 replies, and then I performed 20 user interviews. Patients on peritoneal dialysis ranging in age from 35 to 60, as well as their doctors. I created the personas listed below. The majority of them began dialysis 10 years ago.
Research
Learn from other competitors
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Graph to show the specific time, and can check the details.
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Show the most important value for the data: the average, the total (depends on the item)
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Patients can remark the in the data
Ideation for dashboard
Ideation
Patients need to measure 2 times for pressure, two times for weight and 4 times for CAPD. Base on previous user's insights, they only want to see the important info and it's good to navigate and save their time.
Rack design
The good side user can see all info at a glance
Infos will be too long that users have to scroll down
Carousel design
The interface is clean
Users have to scroll four times if the data has four piece
Show most recently data design
(Selected)
User see the important value only
Users can see further details on the second page
Userflow
UI and Illustration ideation
This takes reference from humaaans.com. This lively and flexible style really suits uppermed. We want to promote a relaxing and healthy lifestyle, so we apply blue and green colours, and plants to be the main illustration.
Patients meet with doctor scenario
Flower blooming represents the hope and life.
Illustration icon
Icons with colour spot makes it easy to recognise, and has a lively style to it too.
Plant illustration
Adding texture to the grass makes it into a rich looking and multilevel design.
Usability test
A tests were performed on 10 patients. In addition to operational problems, we also found issues on operational problems, we also found issues on patients’ concerns. For example, the blood tests that patients need to have every three months often require a lot of paper records. Some patients also expressed a desire to be able to understand the normal range of each body data without having to go through a thick manual. Their requests give us a better understanding of the needs of the peritoneal dialysis population.
Usability test
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(Before)
Redesign 1
Improvements to make it easier to navigate for non-tech people
1.Today for the title of this page is not that flexible in stead of using general title like My dashboard.
2.Too many icons for non tech people are not easy to use at the first time.
3.Too many action on the main page.
4.Interaction is not that user- friendly.
5.Too many information on one page, users are hard to digest and find the useful information.
(After)
Final design
Final design
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Layer the information to navigate easily: Landing page + detailed page
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Select a date picker here to view the different date's dashboard.
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Show the most important value on the dashboard. Users can navigate to specific value pages from here.
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With landing page and detail page structure, user can better navigate the information.
Landing page
Value detail page
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Track various statistics using tabs and quickly take notes for tracking everyday conditions.
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With the tab bar, it's easy to see where they are now and switch to different item's trend.
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Change to different periods easily to view other trends.
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After clicking note icon, there is a modal popup showing the note details on the same page. It's useful for patients to communicate with the doctors.
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Reminder for return visit to the hospital
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A notification on the dashboard to remind patients they have an upcoming event, in order to make patient's busy life easier.
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Clicking "check my appointment" will lead to my appointment detail page, where patients can edit the note.
Challenge
This project required cooperating with a startup doing a hardware and software product and I'm responsible for the App design. The challenging part is verifying the Bluetooth connection with the hardware device and the App because of the slow implementation of the device. Therefore we tried to focus on the App and get user feedback via interviews and usability tests with patients. This App will also help this startup to get funding by showing good test results from the patients and doctors. The most interesting part is to transform the complex paper note-taking method into a digital one with simple input and output communication.
Challenge
Results and next step
10/10 of patients think the concept is successful and help their life easier while doing dialysis treatment.
7/10 of patients think it's good to quickly see their today results on dashboard .
5/5 of doctor and nurses provide positive feedback will help them remind patients to return visit the hospital. It reduces labor from hopistal.
In the future, there might be a version for Hemodialysis patients and a specific online market function for Kidney disease patients to purchase their medicine and supplies, as well as a function to add partners so they will feel less lonely doing treatments and allow data to be tracked by family.
Lessons learned
It is a project through which I understand more about Peritoneal Dialysis patients. Their life is so inconvenient because of doing Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis. They need to exchange body fluid four times a day. I developed empathy to put myself in their shoes. This App is to help them reduce the pain for an inconvenience in daily life such as recording the body condition on paper. Therefore, they can live happily and like normal people with Uppermed.
I joined the project starting with the interview, usability test with patients. I cooperated with a CEO in a tech start-up, to think from a business and product perspective. I enjoyed this project by transforming the user's pain point into an innovative and workable solution that is satisfying for the users.
Uppermed Peritoneal Dialysis APP
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