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Symptom Relief
Clue / 2019
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
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.
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What is your job/industry?
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Do you have any current health or wellness goals? If so, what are they?
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Have you encountered a challenge that has stopped you from reaching these goals? If so, can you please elaborate?
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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
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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.
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.
We combined and refined our ideas to the top three. Some factors we considered with these ideas was 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
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Information Overload: A lot of content being 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.
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:
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Search multiple symptoms using keywords in the search bar
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Click on the popular symptom tags
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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.
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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