OVERVIEW
AirPal is an asthma management companion app
to help patients keep track of their medication, receive health insights, and stay informed about their condition.
Role
Product Designer
Company
Freelance
Year
2023
Project Length
3 months
Team
Solo
Project background
Challenge
Living with asthma is like walking through a field of mines —
one wrong step could result in serious injury. Patients must diligently manage medications, monitor weather and air quality, avoid allergens, maintain a healthy lifestyle, and cultivate a positive mood to minimize the risk of triggering severe asthma reactions.
What is an asthma condition?
Treatment for asthma condition?
Challenge
Experienced asthma patients have resources but lack the tools to manage asthma conditions
While 1/5 of the U.S. population lives with asthma, not everyone has the same experiences and conditions.
Although patients can consult their healthcare providers for treatment plans and advice, they have to manage the condition on their own on a daily basis.
Users like Alex often develop their habits and strategies around their condition, such as memorizing asthma triggers or setting reminders for their medications.
User research overview
Research goals
Alex
Define
How might we empower patients with meaningful information to help them better manage their conditions?
Based on the core product experiences derived from Alex’s user journey, I initiated the ideation of user flows aimed at advancing towards an MVP design.
Monitoring Experience
Alex can check her health insights and the weather index so she always prepare her day based on her condition and treatment plan.
Logging Experience
Alex can log her medication and preventive treatments to stay consistent and have better communication with her healthcare team.
Emergency Experience
In the event of an asthma attack, AirPal can send out an automatic distress call for Alex and get the help she needs in time.
Ideate
Skate, test, iterate
The most effective method to assess idea efficacy is through rapid prototyping and obtaining early user feedback.
After building 20+ screens and 4 user flows (onboarding, monitoring, logging, and emergency), I recruited 4 users to evaluate and tested various versions of the user flows.
Their input was invaluable, which helped refine navigation, minimize errors, and boost user satisfaction.
Key metrics for user testing
V1 - simple, but not enough
Here is an example of iterating users flows based on user feedback.
The initial approach to the dashboard design featured an all-in-one, single-scroll, and widget-rich layout.
It immediately became apparent that users would like to incorporate a way to manage and track their medications.
Therefore, "medication management" became a primary focus during the iteration phase.
V2 - too much history, not enough insights
One of the initial ideas was to develop a "My Routine" dashboard, offering a comprehensive overview of the user's asthma management journey.
This screen would show the history of medication, exercise journey, and other user activities that could relate to asthma treatment routine.
However, users responded with mediocrity to this concept, indicating that showcasing their routine history lacked practical value in their daily lives.
V3 - visual over text
The values of a dashboard is to help user quickly understand context by providing aggregated insights and suggesting high priority action items.
This streamlines the decision-making process, saving users valuable time.
Thus, another round of ideation centered around this HMW statement:
How might we better communicate trends and insights?
In this round, the my effort focused on improving the medication dashboard and related insights.
V4 - need better visual contrast
The first hi-fi wireframe were created by combining the pros of each ideas.
This approach also considered the scalability and consistency of the design system.
However, the design failed to presents the connection between the medication overview (top) and the data visualization (bottom).
Users also noted insufficient visual contrast between the category navigation and the filter button, leading to confusion.
V5 - bento box approach
The final approach introduces a dynamic way for users to digest insights about each medication.
Usability score improved by 25% compared to the previous iteration, as the data is now more digestible.
Pivot
Less actions, more insights
During the first round of user testing, many participants pointed out that features such as presets and shortcuts were absent.
This creates inconvenience during daily usage.
Additionally, the initial version of health insight does not provide enough context or values.
Users like Alex have numerous applications on their device vying for their attention.
The last thing they want is to spend more time on a new app that would require their input without giving them lots of values.
To address the issue, the second round of designing focused on reducing user inputs and improving insight delivery across the product experiences.
Here is a couple example of how the feedback is implemented in the ideation stage.
Health Dashboard
Before
The single-scroll dashboard restricted Alex from viewing data at a glance.
Insights such as health and action items were not prioritized on the top of the screen.
After
With the redesigned navigation and new dashboards, Alex can easily find the information she wants to see.
Alex can quickly digest insights with the new visual design of widgets.
Medication Log
Before
Alex would need to spend over 1 minute to manually enter details every time she log, leading to increased friction and user frustration.
After
Alex can easily log her medication history by saving medication details on her profile, saving valuable time.
Logging medication only only take minimum two clicks to complete, streamlining the process and decreasing user effort.
FEEDBACK
User satisfaction increased by 50%
By implementing changes to address identified user pain points—such as improving navigation, incorporating shortcuts, refining information hierarchy, and enhancing data visualization—our user testing revealed a remarkable 50% increase in user satisfaction.
Additionally, users enjoyed the straightforward product experience, enabling them to effortlessly log their medical journey and gain valuable insights into their daily progress.
This experiment taught an important lesson: that a simple experience cannot simply be achieved through a simple UI.be achieved simply
