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Clue: Symptom Relief

Clue / SFU / 2019

Three screenshots of the Clue app. The righthand screenshot is the Home page, the middle screenshot is the Explore page and the left screenshot is the Suggestions feature. There is a green background.

In my Interaction Design class, my group partner Caylin Barrett and I designed a new feature for an existing app, Clue, the period, ovulation and health app. Our new feature was symptom relief: Allowing the user to explore symptom relief options based on recommendations from tracking or through a search function. 

My role: My role was the UX designer and my teammate's was writing content for the app. We both collaborated on UX Research.

UNDERSTAND

User Interviews

For this project, we started our process of designing a new feature first by identifying the current user goals and the main uses of the application. We interviewed 5 current users of the app to better understand them and analyze their goals. We asked them questions about their job, their lifestyle choices and their current uses of the app.

 

  • What is your job/industry?

  • ​Do you have any current health or wellness goals? If so, what are they? 

  • ​Have you encountered a challenge that has stopped you from reaching these goals? If so, can you please elaborate? 

  • What feature within the Clue app do you use the most? Is there something specific you like or dislike about it? Please explain.


From these interviews, we were able to summarize these goals into a persona. Some common user goals and motivations in our research were: 
 

Being able to search through content, based on their needs

Understanding why and when they should track certain symptoms

Getting recommended content to avoid finding it themselves

Finding actual hand-on relief to help their symptoms

A graphic of the user persona we created. The user is Amanda a 33 year old Software Engineer. She has been using Clue but is recently trying to get pregnant so uses it to predict ovulation. Her goal is to get pregnant, her motivations are convience and accessibility of information and her frustrations include too many resources online about pregnany.

Empathy Maps

We used our research questions and user persona to develop an empathy map that would allow us to further articulate the user goals as well as know what to focus our design tasks on.

An empathy map about Clue users. The first diagram is "What do the users say?" "What do the users do?" "What do the user feel?" and "What do the users think?"

With all of our research, persona and empathy maps we now had a defined problem. To reframe our problems into potential design opportunities, we create How Might We prompts to start our process of designing solutions.

Diagram of "How Might We" statements. There are four cards that say "Give users hands-on symptom relief options based on their tracked symptoms
An image of all of my wireframe sketches.

We combined and refined our ideas to the top three. Some factors we considered with these ideas were how they aligned with user goals as well as stakeholder goals and how they fit within Clue's existing features. Ultimately, we decided that the symptom relief feature was solving the biggest issue, as expressed by our user research: the lack of hands-on relief.

EXPLORE

Wireframe Sketches

Using our user goals/persona, we started our brainstorming process by first producing several ideas in a short amount of time. This allowed us to explore many options without focusing too hard on details. I produced my ideas through a quick sketching process of wireframes. 
 

DESIGN PROBLEMS

For our prototype, we had the feature built within the existing homepage (the current cycle). The different symptom relief methods could be found categorized by type of relief and users could horizontally swipe to discover the relief in that section. For this user interaction, however, we realized some design problems:
 

Matching Mental Models

  • Information Overload: A lot of content is presented from the beginning of the interaction.

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  • Categories & Mental Models: The categories didn't fit the mental model of the users - users would be going to search for relief by symptom.

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  • Horizontal Scrolling: The horizontal scrolling was not user-friendly for indicating where the end of the list ended.

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  • The Beginner User: There currently was no feature for the beginner user - where relief was being directly recommended to them.

Image of the Symptom Relief feature. There is a search bar to search features and then three sections of content. There is Videos, Audio and Articles.
REFINE

To solve the design problems with our first prototype, we started by redesigning the homepage to start the interaction at the level of the beginner user that could be continued to the more experienced user. We did this by starting the interaction with recommended relief based on the user's tracked symptoms.

From here, if the user would love to explore further, they could be directed to more options by tapping the "explore more" button. 

Each relief element contains the title (description) of the relief, what symptom it relieves and the type of relief it is (video, article or audio).

If the user wanted to continue the interaction or was a more experienced user, they could continue looking for relief through the "explore relief" section. In this section, the user can:
 

  1. Search multiple symptoms using keywords in the search bar

  2. Click on the popular symptom tags

  3. Explore the list of relief by type of symptom

 

​By offering different ways of interacting with the symptom relief feature, each user is given a user task that will align with their goals, whether it be to deeply navigate all options or briefly review a few of them.
 

Image of the Explore Relief feature. There is sections for Body, Vitality and Activity.

Design Solutions

REFLECTION

This project taught me the importance of creating personas and empathy maps to understand the user you are designing for. As this is an existing application, it was important to understand the current users to ensure the transition of a new feature would involve smooth interactions that are consistent with the existing design. 

This project also made me realize the significance of designing a feature at different levels of interactions (beginner/advanced) as well as catering towards a range of goals. In this app, it was important to offer both symptom relief that would directly be given to the user, as well as giving them the option to explore the interaction further and explore their own options. 
 

Designing for All

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