Creating a gastric symptom tracker to enhance clinical research data.
Overview
A PhD fellow at the National Institute for Health Innovation (NIHI) is including pediatric patients in her research with Alimetry, but faces challenges with the current app's lack of inclusivity for children. She has also observed that asking children to recall their symptoms during the week can result in biased data due to poor memory recall and focus on worst symptoms. To address these challenges, she wants a child-friendly app that supports accurate symptom reporting.
Challenge
Design a web app serving as an MVP for researchers, offering a comprehensive summary of paediatric participants' gastric symptoms and events over the preceding seven days leading up to their clinic day.
Role
Role: UX Designer
Timeline: 10 weeks.
Devices: Mobile responsive web-app
Team: Developers, Nisha Chottath and Simon Li. Acknowledgement to the other UX design interns for their contribution during the first couple of weeks of the project: Chloe Wang, Michelle Ee and Kayla Osbourne. 

Contribution
Stakeholder interviews

Secondary research

Competitor research

User Flows

Wireframes

Prototype

Usability testing

3 Key phases of the project:
Our design process for this project involved three distinct phases
1. EMPATHISE
We sought to understand the researcher's and participant's needs.
The team wanted to get a deeper understanding of the current frustrations and pain points for the researcher and participants. What did they want? What did they need?
To help us we interviewed the researcher and did a deep dive into UX best practices for designing for children. Due to limitations we were not able to interview any paediatric participants which would have been helpful to uncovering further insights.
1-1 interview:
We interviewed the researcher and we discovered some interesting insights that included:
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The current Alimetry app is not suitable for paediatric use, requires supervision from an adult.

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Participants' symptoms on the clinic-day may not be representative of how they have felt throughout the week. Currently, there is no way to capture the participant's symptoms 7 days leading up to test day.
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The ressearcher wants a product with an engaging dashboard where children understand how to record their symptoms and use the app unassisted.
UX design best practices for children.
Unfortunately, we didn't get the chance to interview any children, which is crucial for understanding the target audience we are designing for. To compensate for this, we delved deep into UX design best practices for children and made some interesting discoveries
Key insights: 

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Simple interactions - Kids have different abilities and dexterity to adults. Keep interactions to simple interactions e.g Tap, Click, Drag.

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Make things obvious and accessible. E.g Design big, noticeable buttons, high contrast and bold colours.

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Younger kids learn through exploration and discovery.
2. CONCEPTUALISE
We prioritised to form a strategy
We needed to start prioritising our insights gained to form a strategy. At this stage of the design process, our goal was to: 

Understand key pain points, wants and needs.
Classify insights gathered.
Present our synthesis to stakeholders.
Putting insights together as a proto-persona
We created proto-personas as part of a UX design to help the design team develop empathy for the users by putting themselves in the users' shoes. This helped the team better understand the users' motivations, behaviours, and pain points, and design a product that addresses these needs. 

It served as a communication tool between the design team and other stakeholders, such as clients, developers, and marketers. By having a clear understanding of who the target users are, stakeholders can better understand the design decisions being made and the rationale behind them


Key insights: 

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Capability of a 7 year old is going to be different to one of a teenager.

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Younger children have difficulty understanding and describing the symptom
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Parents wants an app that the child can use easily so they can give it to them at the end of each day and they complete it on their own.
Competitor research to help solve our challenge
We conducted a competitor analysis to gain valuable insights and inform our design decisions. This process was instrumental in helping us think creatively and find inspiration to solve our design challenge.

One key benefit of the competitor analysis was that it helped us validate some of our assumptions about the type of features that would be child-friendly. By analysing competitors' products, we were able to benchmark our initial ideas against other products in the market and use this as a basis for comparison to show the stakeholder.

Another important benefit was that the analysis helped us gain insights into what users expect in terms of user experience, functionality, and features. This information allowed us to tailor the design of our product to ensure it meets or exceeds user expectations.

Some of the key insights we gained from the analysis include:
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Communication through images and audio instead of only words and numbers is a common pattern.
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Using a slider with colors instead of numbers is a commonly used interactive scale that children of all ages will be able to use.
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Human models used to pinpoint the location of pain is commonly used.
3. DESIGN
Facing tight deadlines to hand over to the developers.
Due to a tight deadline, we needed to start designing the web app quickly to ensure that the developers could begin building it.
Before we began the design process, we had several questions to answer, including whether the design needed to be mobile responsive, whether we needed a design system, and what our visual design language would be. 


Our research showed that the web app would be used on different devices such as children's notebooks, tablets, or phones, as well as on their parents' devices. Therefore, we knew the design had to be responsive to different screen sizes.

To ensure that we were efficient and that the product was designed correctly from the beginning, we prioritized creating a design system. The web app was meant to be an extension of Alimetry, so the client wanted to maintain a similar design language to the current Alimetry app. 


Once we had answered our questions and established our priorities, we began designing the app. We focused on creating a few key pages that we could get approved by the client to pass on to the developers for coding, while the rest of the app was designed.

After the client signed off on the dashboard and onboarding screens, we completed designing the remaining screens. However, our journey didn't end there. After handing over the full design to the developers to build the MVP, we user-tested the prototype with some children in the field to ensure that it met their needs and expectations.
Design system
Here's a glimpse into the design system which not only enabled our design team to work more efficiently and collaboratively but also ensured that the product's design aligned with Alimetry's branding and visual identity. Moreover, it facilitated the smooth transition of design work to the developer
Some highlights from our design process:
1. User flow
It was important to keep the user flow simple and not too long to encourage the participant to complete a daily symptom entry.
Children may become overwhelmed if there are too many options or too much information on the dashboard. The goal was to keep the design simple and intuitive, with only the most important actions and information visible.

2. Dashboard design

To create a user dashboard that is easy for children to use, we needed to consider their unique needs and abilities.
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We aimed to keep the design simple and organise content in a logical way.
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It was a challenge to incorporate bright and engaging colours while adhering to the branding requirements set by the client. We carefully selected engaging graphics that were appropriate for a range of ages among the children who would be using the dashboard.
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One effective approach we used was to employ large and clear symptom tiles, which help children understand what actions they can take on the dashboard. It was crucial to ensure that the icons were large enough and clearly represented the actions they represented.

3. A child-friendly sliding scale to record symptom severity.
We set out to find a way for a child to record their severity of the symptoms, making the process of recording symptoms more engaging, precise, and user-friendly for children.
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Bright colours and clear icons used: 
It is a visual representation that can be easily understood by children, even those who may not be able to read numbers yet. The use of bright colours to indicate severity levels adds an element of visual interest and makes it more engaging and fun for children.
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Use of Icons and Numbers: 
Having both the icons and numerical value provides clarity and precision for both children and medical professionals. It provides a more concrete representation of their symptom severity. This way, children can communicate the severity of their symptoms accurately who understand the number system and doctors can make better informed decisions based on the recorded information
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Vertical design: 
It is an intuitive and easy-to-use feature that can be incorporated seamlessly into the overall design of the app. Designing the sliding scale vertically with ‘None’ at the bottom and the ‘most severe imaginable’ at the top helps communicate the severity scale of the symptom being recorded because it mimics the way we traditionally think about severity - with the most severe being "higher" or "worse" than less severe levels
Usability testing for future iterations.
I conducted usability testing with 3 children across different age groups, 6, 12, and 16, to gather real user feedback and validate our design assumptions. Through these tests, we gained valuable insights that will help inform the direction for future iterations.


These findings will help us create a more tailored user experience for each age group.
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Our first key insight was that the app was intuitive for the majority of users. The 12 and 16-year-old completed all tasks with confidence, and the user flow was simple and not too long. All participants were able to intuitively use the slider bar and number counter.
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The second insight we gathered was that understanding the questions and terminology is critical for success, and the 6-year-old participant had difficulty completing tasks due to lower literacy and comprehension abilities.This suggests a need for multiple versions of the web app or a feature that provides more support and guidance. quick tweaks can be made such as simplifying the language.
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Finally, we found that gamification and engaging content are motivating for younger users, while reminder features are more valuable for older cohorts.
OUTCOMES
The journey doesn't end here.
The MVP of the web app was completed by the developers and the researcher will be using it with her next round of research participants.
The researcher is in early discussions with the hospital oncology department for the potential use of this app to help track post-chemo gastric symptoms for children.
The valuable insights gained from the usability testing will help inform the design iterations for future interns.
Challenges and learnings.
I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to work on this project, as it combined my health professional background with my UX skills. Drawing on my experience diagnosing patients, I was able to quickly gain a solid understanding of the project's background. The first few weeks were intense, with pressure to design and deliver pages to the intern developers. However, my quick grasp of the project requirements made the process more efficient.
Working alongside three other UX design interns during the first couple of weeks of the project, we collaborated well to bounce ideas off each other. However, we faced challenges with such a large team for the amount of work required. Despite this, we ensured equal delegation of work and opportunities for everyone to contribute. After the initial weeks of the projects the other UX design interns were assigned other projects to work on.
During the front-end build, I made myself available daily to assist with design-related questions, revisions, and problem-solving. I faced some challenges with developers' understanding of the user flow, but we were able to overcome them. The handover process was a rewarding challenge, and I enjoyed working with the developers. I identified this as an area where I could improve and develop my skills for future projects.
Overall, this project allowed me to dive deeply into UX design best practices for children.
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