Client
Daman Digital
My role
Qualitative research
Literature review
Insights to concept
UI design
Data analysis & visualization
Prototype testing
Year
2021-2022
Challenge
Motivating people suffering from Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) to regularly track their symptoms and activities in the Rheumabuddy App to generate insights of interest to the pharma industry as well as app users.
Living with Rheumatoid Arthritis
Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease which causes inflammation in joints. Having RA inflicts pain, stiffness and fatigue. Only a small percentage of people suffering from RA achieve remission through medical treatment. For the rest, symptoms are likely to get worse as time passes, leading to physical impairment and immobility.
Getting diagnosed with RA and living with the consequences can be a great challenge both mentally and physically. Being in pain and lack of energy can cut you off from the people and the activities you love and lead to feelings of loneliness, inadequacy, shame, guilt and despair.
Solution
The redesign of the Rheumabuddy app served a two-fold objective: engaging users to track more frequently and over a longer period of time by providing individualized guidance assisting users in what they can do to improve their health-related well-being. Up until the redesign, RheumaBuddy has primarily served as a tool to keep track of symptoms and thoughts. The redesign is a shift towards bringing value back to the user by utilizing user behaviour, user tracking and individual medical characteristics. Through personalized insights and recommendations, RheumaBuddy helps users get a deeper understanding of their disease patterns and find ways to better cope with their situation both physically and mentally. Advanced data analysis of individual health tracking combined with anonymised medical health data is used to suggest relevant exercises, social connections and disease information.
Process
As a first step, I conducted a review of scientific literature. On one side the purpose was to get an overview of the psychological, physical, social and existential impacts of living with RA. Secondly, it was an investigation into the evidence on what can be done both medically, mentally and practically in everyday life to improve the inflammatory state and the general quality of life.
As part of a Eurostar funded project 30 interviews with RA patients and 20 interviews with rheumatologists were conducted. The interviews were done in cooperation with The Parker Institute of Copenhagen and Medizinische Universität Wien. The objective of the interviews was to uncover a potential design opportunity space by understanding the struggles which people suffering from RA are dealing with and the role which rheumatologists play in improving their quality of life.
A key finding was that there is a gap between patient needs and what the public healthcare system can offer, especially within the mental domain.
As a precursor to going into solution mode, I made a hypothesis map. The idea was to logically illustrate knowledge gathered from the literature review and interviews. Segmented by domains which could potentially impact the quality of life of people suffering from RA, the hypothesis mapping served as a thinking tool where hypotheses could be linked back to underlying assumptions. Internally the map was used to facilitate discussions on the potential of going into different domains and analyze/question underlying assumptions and hypotheses.
I conducted a series of workshops with patient representatives. The goal of the first portion of explorative workshops was to get users’ perspectives on which struggles they would like an app to support. Psychological, social and existential difficulties showed to be a central topic of discussion. To dig deeper into how social and psychological struggles could be supported by an app, I conducted a couple of co-creation workshops. Alongside a catalogue of relevant ideas, the workshops revealed that the ability to engage in social and physical activities greatly varies among RA patients and that the capabilities, in general, are much lower than for people not having the disease. This highlighted the importance of a personalized and well-adjusted user experience presenting users with recommendations within their capabilities.
Even though patient representatives pointed towards social and mental well-being as relevant domains, I decided to initially keep the ideation phase open to get the full picture before narrowing down a direction. In practice, this meant generating ideas within all the health and well-being related domains identified during the hypothesis mapping phase. The overview of the domain ideas helped me clarify which domains could co-exist in a design concept and narrow in on ideas which could both help engage the user and produce tracking data of interest to the pharma industry. After another round of ideation I evaluated the ideas with rheumatologists, stakeholders connected to the Eurostar project and stakeholders within the company, as part of the refinement and selection process.
The main focal point of the final concept was personalized learning and behaviour change through insights and recommendations, with a focus on what the patient can do mentally and physically to improve their situation.
I developed initial wireframes, designs and prototypes based on the results from the ideation phase. These were shared with patient representatives on a bi-weekly basis to get proof-of-concept and refine presentation and interaction design.
To enable the generation of personalized insights and recommendations, I selected relevant data to focus on and designed data visualizations in tight cooperation with a company specialized in artificial intelligence, statistics and data science.
Finally, ideas were broken down into chunks of functionalities, released within the app on an ongoing basis and monitored on key performance indicators such as improvements in user tracking or key health indicators.
