MySymptoMS Daily Tracker
Laying the foundation for improved health tracking for MS patients
[Red Jelly, 2018]
In the mySymptoms project, I led the discovery, information architecture, and user experience design for an app tailored to MS patients to track symptoms, food intake, treatments, and moods. The groundwork I established created a strong, user-centric foundation aimed at empowering MS patients to better understand and manage their health.
Challenge
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurological disease that affects more than two million people worldwide. The condition causes many symptoms, including pain, fatigue, vision loss, and impaired coordination. Many therapies are available, so clinicians can theoretically switch treatments based on both the condition and side effects, but this can prove difficult between monthly patient visits.
To address this need, The Menzies Institute is developing a health care management system – InforMS – for people with MS. It will visualize patient-reported data and allow sharing with clinicians via a worldwide registry.
The MySymptoMS Daily Tracker App will be a granular data entry tool for those patients. It will enable timely treatment changes and give doctors and patients greater confidence that treatments are working. The app will have several benefits for patients, doctors, and researchers: it will empower people with MS to take a central role in managing their disease and encourage them to keep track of symptoms and treatments which they may not accurately recall at a later stage; it will give users the tools to identify patterns and effectively make decisions in their symptom management; and it will deliver aggregated data frequently and accurately to researchers, helping them identify trends and inform the search for a cure.
Approach
Someone with MS may have symptoms ranging from fatigue (about 80% of people), numbness or tingling in extremities, weakness, and vision problems through cognitive impairment – including the ability to process information, remember new information, problem-solve or focus attention. A key challenge in this project was that we effectively designed for people suffering from potential impairment and distress when entering data.
I lead several workshops to understand needs and determine requirements, both patient and organisational viewpoints. With the learnings from these workshops, my lead developer and I built an interactive scoping framework, where the client could determine the necessary components and the nice-to-have features required for their MVP. A clearly defined scope understood and agreed upon by both parties helped us avoid creep and manage client expectations.
We also had to balance the researcher's goals against the patient's needs. With recommendations informed by experience and user research throughout the design process, I took on the role of advocate for the end user. Strong evidence-based rationales supported all decisions.
It was essential for the success of the project for patients to have the ability to record symptoms when and where they occurred. Therefore, I recommended a mobile-first strategy, whereas the client had been planning a desktop-only solution.
After developing a high-level IA and user flow, I designed mobile-first wireframes. The UX design was simple yet nuanced, with large tap targets and an intuitive interaction model to ensure the app would be usable by people with varying levels of ability.
The app would be highly personalised and contextual – it would anticipate a user’s needs at a particular time, harness auto-suggest to reduce data entry requirements, and offer valuable insights to facilitate patient self-management.
I developed a card-based prototyping system, allowing user testing early in the UX design process. Users would navigate the card prototypes, performing predefined tasks, and we would record their reactions and feedback. The results of these tests informed quick design iteration.
Results
Although the project was not completed by the time I left, the discovery work, information architecture, and UX design I developed laid the groundwork for a user-centric app that aimed to empower MS patients to better understand their health patterns and manage their condition more effectively. The work completed up to this point provided a clear roadmap for the remaining design and development phases, ensuring the app would meet the needs of its users.
Key Takeaways
The early stages of the mySymptoms project highlighted the importance of thorough research and thoughtful design when creating tools for patients with chronic conditions. By focusing on user needs from the beginning, we set the stage for an app that could genuinely improve patients' lives, giving them greater control over their health through intuitive tracking and data visualisation.