Care app
Improving cancer care journey
Pharmaceutical company
Care is an app and platform designed to be a bridge between doctors, patients and caregivers. For the patients, it provides an interactive and supporting way for people with some types of cancer to understand and keep track of their recovery journey, access relevant information and support, and stay close to the medical team and caregivers. Instead, the medical team is a support tool that allows them to collaborate and get closer to the patient.
Role
As part of the team, we work together in the initial stages of the project starting with User Research until the concept definition, then I focus on the User experience and User interface of the Patient app, providing also, visual assets for the medical web platform.
The methods used in the project included user research, personas, user flows, information architecture, prototyping, and testing, as well as the tools of Sketch, InVision and Miro.
USER RESEARCH / INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE / INTERACTION / USER INTERFACE / PROTOTYPING / TESTING
The challenge
Two sides of the same coin
Our goal for the project was to create a product that responds to two different kinds of users, on the one hand, speed up the collaboration and team organization between oncologists and health team and on the other hand, give the patient the tools to understand and have a complete view of all the steps of their therapy, get involved in their own healing and recuperation process and have access to reliable information and support according to the stage and type of journey.
How to face it
Focus on the patient
We started analyzing the different actors that would interact with the platform and mapping the user needs and how these needs adapt and evolve in the different phases and stages of the journey.
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I focus on understanding the struggles and emotional complexity faced by a person who finds himself in front of a cancer diagnosis, I do this by combining information from different sources like cancer support websites, talking with healthcare assistants, interviews, patient stories, and medical research.
From the UX to the UI
From the UX to the UI
With all this analysis in mind, we moved to the information architecture and the first wireframes of both applications and made a double check between them to be sure we didn't forget something important, we decided on the design concept and at that point, I move forward with the patient app, defining a visual identity getting fun with colours, fonts, icons, illustrations and finally start to put all together to create a prototype, for each new sections I work closely with the development team to understand the struggles and sometimes find together a better way to reach our goals.
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For this project, we use an agile methodology and Trello to track all the activities and milestones, in other words, let's say that we have 2 long calls two times per week and talk between teams almost every day but in the end, the result was amazing.
Result
Positive results but let’s continue
Before starting with the pilot, we did a lot of bug finding and testing to be sure everything was ready to use, the pilot started with the medical platform so that gave me time to take care of all the app details like empty states actions and illustrations, error messages and checking the animation effects.
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Right now some different hospitals and institutions are testing it, the project is also evolving to incorporate other types of cancer and maybe in the future could be used for other pathologies.
Final comments
From my point of view, this kind of disease is not enough to support the patient during the therapy process but continues during the follow-up phase, so this could be the next step.
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I have to say that I connect with this project and I feel that it could make a difference in the life of a person with cancer so I try to take care of all the details to make them feel calm, supported and secure.
