Health Companion UX Case Study
By: J. David Ruiz
Reshaping Health in 2025
About the App
We're developing a new mobile app aimed at helping individuals with chronic health conditions manage their medications and doctor appointments. The app will allow users to set reminders, track their medication usage, and communicate with healthcare professionals.
Our Research Process
As part of our UX case study, we conducted user research to gather valuable insights. We utilized a research form to collect feedback and understand user needs. Below is the link to the form we used:
Key Findings
• Observed user preferences for medicament tracking tools. This could be for daily pills, weekly doctor apointments or any other medicine related event they want to schedule.
• Importance of alerts and notifications. A big pain point is remembering to take medicine at the correct time. A distinctive alert noise through their devices would help with that.
• Seamless communication with their medical advisor. Users would like to be able to contact their doctor for general questions about their medication or to book appointments.
User Personas
Image source: Pexels (Free Stock Photo)
Persona Name: Michel Lefebvre, The Forgetful
Brief Summary:
Michel is aged 60, is retired and married. He lives in Laval with his wife at their condo.
Goals:
- To stay on track with his medications
- To monitor his health
Motivations:
- To maintain independence from relying too much on family
- To reduce his anxiety over forgotten medications
Frustrations:
- Seeing that he forgot to take his pills in the morning when it's already night
- Manually keeping track through notes
Pain Points:
- Forgetting to take medication on time
- Feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information about his medications
App usage
Michel would use the app to write down which medication he needs to take and their respective times of the day. He would also use the automatic reminder feature on his phone which shows a simple and recognizable sound when he needs to take his medicine. He could also use a medication instruction feature that would show him instructions on how to take certain medicines which are trickier like pills that need to be taken with food, that may have interactions with foods like alcohol or that have side effects such as drowsiness. All these features will have easy to read instructions with large text and optional voice instructions.
Image source: Pexels (Free Stock Photo)
Persona Name: Clara Rogers, The Proactive Patient
Brief Summary:
Clara is 55, works part time at a school in Toronto and has two adult children.
Goals:
- To communicate easily with her doctor
- To ask questions about her medications such as dosage and side effects
- To be able to order her new or renewing prescriptions from the app for pickup or delivery
- To be informed in advance when her refills are coming up
Motivations:
- To stay independent and manage her medicine without family help
- To have quick access to information about her medication without having to visit the doctor
- To have the convenience of refilling her medication from the app
Frustrations:
- No way to track and refill her prescriptions online
Pain Points:
- Lack of easy access with a healthcare professiona
App Usage
Clara would use the app to message her doctor for questions about the medicine she is taking such as dosage, side effects or advice. She would use the online refill feature which informs her pharmacy in advance that her refills are due so she can pick them up at her convenience. Lastly she would use a history feature to see her previous prescriptions, doctor’s advice and dosage instructions.
User Journey Mapping
For the user journey I used Persona 2. I showed the different stages of their usage of the application, from first hearing of it, to trying out some features to eventual acceptance and making it part of their habits.
Wireframing and Prototype Design
For the wireframes I decided to show the main page which wil contain an easy access to the main app features. The calendar wireframe also has a simple design where the medicine are elements at the bottom of the page. I showed a simple chat page as well to show the doctor chat feature. Lastly a simple settings page. The focus was simplicity and focusing on the features that mattered to the two personas.
Wireframes:
Prototype:
The final prototype is heavily inspired by the wireframe. I focused on the main features the personas would use. Those are the doctor chat feature, the medication history and the medication calendar reminders and tracking. I chose a green background-color due to its link to health and medicine with a secondary color of white. The main focus is to have menus easy to find and have each feature have its dedicated page that is understandable at first glance
Link to Prototype: Figma Prototype Link
Link to Video Demo: Youtube Link
Usability Testing
The goals of my testing plan would be to test the main features that I gathered from my research on the prototype I created.
Goals:
- Evaluate the ease of use of the medication alarm and calendar feature
- Evaluate the ease of use of the calendar page for medication tracking
- Assess user satisfaction with the overall app design
User Tasks:
- Add a new medication to calendar and set it as taken
- Modify the alarm time of a medication
- Contact a doctor and view your previous chat history
- Review a medication’s refill time and setup a pickup
- Find the last vaccine you took in your medical history
Feedback Collection:
Those tasks would be analyzed by recruiting 5 to 10 participants from the demographics of our personas ( 50 years+) and who have medication management needs. It would also be important that these people have various levels of experience with technology. The participants could join in person or over an online call where they record their phone screen.
Analysis and Iteration:
I would use various metrics to analyse the results such as: Time to complete task, user satisfaction, error rate. I could compile this information to analyze the data and find patterns on which tasks had the most frustration or ease of use. I could also categorize the user feedback to see what user’s thought and felt throughout the experiment. All this information would then be used to decide which actions to take.
Reflection
The beginning of this mini project was very vague in my mind. I had a general idea of what a health app looked like but I was far from understanding the real needs of the users and how to translate them into an UI. The UX design process helped me collect data to truly understand and get into the shoes of the user. Without this process, it would’ve been much harder to design a good UI. The research aspect of the process forced me to think about which questions and information I would need for the rest of the project. Since I only wanted to make a single survey, the questions had to be really well formulated to help me find the goals and pains of users as well as which functionalities they could need. All this data helped tremendously and I was able to truly process it as I built the personas and the user journey mapping. Both these tools helped me solidify much more the results of the survey in a way that stakeholders could easily understand. I found the user journey mapping particularly helpful when thinking about which ways a new user would begin interacting with the app for the first time. A challenging part was designing the wireframe in Figma. I didn’t know how many screens I wanted to show and how to split the features in a way that was both intuitive and easy to access. My first prototypes had too little on each page which forced me to make too many pages. I ended up opting for a design with a simple main page which has all the most used features and a wireframe for each important feature. Additionally, the prototype was also challenging since I’m new to Figma so there was a learning and adaptation period. Another challenge was the amount of writing and creativity that was involved in each step of this research. I spent a lot of time thinking what the personas would think or do for each page of the prototype. This required me to think about my own experience with applications and which features I liked or disliked. Overall I overcame this challenge by using inspiration resources, thinking about my personas and following my creativity inspiration.