Challenge

A startup within a large pharmaceutical company sought to create an app to help caregivers of autistic children track and monitor their child’s behaviors while participating in a clinical study. The data collected from the app and web portal would in turn help researchers better understand patients’ responses to medication and therapies. The startup needed a strategic design partner to drive user experience and visual design of the app, web portal and related clinical trial materials.

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As one of two UX/UI designers on a design agency team, my challenge was to increase engagement in daily data entry by parents participating in the study.  

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Outcome

Our design was driven by the need to create a welcoming and easy-to-use experience for parents. We challenged the conventional clinical study model of standardized forms, instead creating interactive rating scales that give the user immediate feedback on the data they enter. A friendly “voice” was used throughout the app, instead of dry, clinical language, to help to soften the user experience and relieve the burden of daily data entry.

Key deliverables:

• Complete UX/UI design of a parent-facing app and web portal, and a researcher-facing admin dashboard.
• 50+ use case documents, including flow diagrams, business logic and wireframes.

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Read my article, "Rethinking Gamification" to learn more about how I was approaching patient engagement and UX trends.

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Approach

Empathy for the users and achieving the project’s clinical goals drove our approach to this project. We conducted usability testing and research to help the team understand user perspectives, and called upon a game design expert to help us incorporate engagement and motivation into the design. With the client, we facilitated several onsite workshops to describe, refine and prioritize functionality.

Major focus areas:

• Create a behavior-tracking app and web portal that parents would find useful, informative and not burdensome.
• Prioritize feature requests from multiple parties.

Conceptual diagrams, mockups and clickable prototypes were used to engage the team in the design process, and clarify with the development team what we envisioned the experience to be like. An agile process and collaborative dynamic helped the large team to prioritize efforts and maintain visibility of dependencies across sub-teams.

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Lessons Learned

This project was my first experience working for (and with) a clinical study, including Principal Investigators, scientists, study managers, patient families, and the client's internal data & engineering team. I learned a lot about developing studies and directly collecting data from patients, displaying data as easily digestible information, and understanding user motivations as the driver for successful design.

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Since this project, I've worked on over 15 studies with patient-facing data collection, from SPARK to Count Me In.