Dune Nguyen - Portfolio

The Ask

Design a high-fidelity mobile app prototype for a pill reminder system for high functioning brain injury patients. The system uses bluetooth to connect to physical pillbox that has a bluetooth button on it to allow users to press when they have taken medication.

Methods & Tools

2 Individual Interviews
Group Interview
Persona
Survey
Competitive Analysis
Paper Prototype
User Testing
High-Fidelity Prototype using Sketch

Timeline

Year: 2015

Duration: 3 months

User Research Highlights

In our group interview at a geriatric memory club meeting, we found that only 2 of 12 people use smart phones and only one of which remembers to consistently carry it with them. We questioned if this system would fit well into the lives of the patients, but due to time constraints and what we promised our client, we followed through with designing the mobile app prototype.
Patients find the alarm to be annoying and often turn off the sound and forget to take their pills.
Patients need reminders to take their medication, ability to customize alert settings, and a way to track their adherence.

Competitive Analysis

We found that our client's solution was lacking in flexibility for alert customization compared to their competitors.

Paper Prototypes

Our user research helped infuence our design decisions. We created a flexible snooze option so that users can have more control of when their next alert will be triggered. We also added options to turn the sound off their alarm for certain time periods.

User Testing and Design Iteration

We conducted 5 user tests with our paper prototypes which helped with iterating on the design of our paper prototypes. Users found the "Home" paired with a pill icon was not intuitive. Users thought this would show them the contents of the pillbox. They also found the "Alerts" paired with bell or clock icon to be confusing and thought pressing that would turn off the sound.

Our design iteration included these changes:

Change navigation icon/labels
Allow users to delete the medicine from their pillbox
Rename the reminder pop-up button labels
Change the snooze max time interval

Design Choices based on User Findings

We wanted the home page to provide clear feedback to the user of what pills they have taken, missed, skipped and upcoming pills
Users were easily annoyed by the number of alerts they were receiving, so we offered flexible "snooze" time options to help remind them when it was more convenient for them
Users often turned off the sound of their phone and forgot to turn it back on, so we offered "sound off" time options so that the sound would automatically turn back on after their selected time window

Reflection

Towards the end of our design project I had the fortunate opportunity to meet with a professor who had much experience with medicine adherence and he gave us great feedback. One of which was related to the reporting charts. Using the pie chart is fine to report back on the details, but does not provide any motivation or feedback to the user to show progress such as improvement or degradation. He suggested that line charts may provide more motivation. Also, we could have incorporated some sort of gamification factor to help the user be more engaged and active in their medicine taking behaviors.

Finally, it would have been nice to have the physical pill box and a functional prototype working together to observe how it would be used in the true context of a user's life. Considering that many of the seniors we interviewed don't use smart phones, we think more user research should be conducted to find a solution that fits more users lifestyles.

Smart Pills Mobile App Design

my role: Designer and Team Lead