Chronic-Wound Care Mobile App
The Chronic-Wound Care is a mobile app designed to support patients with severe wounds. It helps users track their healing progress and access educational resources. The app is used alongside a wound therapy machine (VAC). The project was advanced to the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Organization
3M
Services
UX Design
Role
UX Design Intern
BACKGROUND: THE MACHINE
Chronic wound: A wound that does not heal in a predictable amount of time and may take years to heal. Diabetics, accidents, or infections usually cause patients with chronic wounds. The pain in chronic wounds arises from either tissue damage or irritation of nerve endings. This resulted in mobility issues and poor clinical outcomes. Patients use negative pressure wound therapy to help the wound heal more quickly. (Image shown below)
BACKGROUND: THE MOBILE APP
Introducing MyWoundHealing: a mobile app to support patients to achieve clinical outcomes
Chronic-Wound Care app, a.k.a MyWoundHealing app, is an existing mobile app that supports patients with chronic wounds (diabetics, accidents, etc.) to achieve a holistic positive health outcome. Since these wounds are severe, patients use negative pressure wound therapy to help the wound heal more quickly.
MY ROLE
End-to-end design process including information architecture, prototypes, concept generation, UI designs
Collaborated with UX researchers to find out about the key insights and findings from user interviews
Actively participated in meetings with external stakeholders, including the global marketing leader and project manager for design feedback and iterations
PROBLEM STATEMENT
A team of UX researchers conducted user research (I was not involved in this research) to discover patients' needs and pain points of using the MyWoundHealing app while undergoing wound therapy. One of the findings was that patients do not feel engaged with the current app's educational content due to poor usability issues. This resulted in only 2% of patients downloading the app. Hence, the question statement is:
How might we engage patients with educational content to
feel confident with their wound care and achieve clinical outcomes?
PERSONA
Meet Robert, a 72-year-old chronic wound patient undergoing wound therapy and have been using the MyWoundHealing app for the past six months
RESEARCH PART 1: USER FLOW
To find out why the education content was not engaging, user flow and information architecture were created to find out UX issues.
RESEARCH PART 2: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Educational contents were highlighted in purple to indicate the amount of videos
FINDINGS FROM RESEARCH 1&2
There were repeated contents, cluttered information,
inconsistent video length, and too many clicks
Observed cluttered content with a mix of video and text-based instructions.
Inconsistency in video length, ranging from 2 to 20 minutes.
User flow indicates that more than two steps are required to learn about a topic.
APPLYING FINDINGS FROM RESEARCH
With bite-sized, personalized video content, and less number of clicks, Robert was able to learn about wound therapy without feeling overwhlemed.
I redesigned the information architecture based on my learnings from the market research. Since educational content was important for wound patients, I reorganized the home screen features by prioritizing educational content. The top section includes personalized education content based on their wound therapy status. The navigation to access videos has also been streamlined, reducing the number of clicks.
USER FLOW
PROPOSED INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
RESEARCH PART 2
To solve the UX issues of the app, I looked into a few existing apps that provide educational content
I looked into several apps, including Headspace, Wonar Health, Duolingo, Hinge Health, Coursera, and Khan Academy. This market research gave me valuable perspectives on user-friendly interfaces, engaging content from visually appealing UI designs, and the user experience of the overall navigation.
PROPOSED CONCEPTUAL DESIGNS
A low-fidelity visual representation of Robert watching the educational video on the 1st day of his wound therapy
I translated key UX and UI features identified in market research into a low-fidelity wireframe for a basic representation of the app's layout and functionality. This iterative design process, lasting two weeks, involved ongoing discussions with the UX team and external stakeholders to receive feedback and continue refinements, aligning business goals with
patients' needs.
RESULT
With the redesigned MyWoundHealing app, Robert is able to learn about wound care easily so that he feels more confident to go through this journey and achieve positive health outcomes.
I presented the conceptual designs to a team of internal and external stakeholders. This project proceeded to the MVP. Due to confidentiality purposes, I am unable to show the final designs or the metrics of the result. Learn more about the value I brought to this team, the limitations of the project, etc, at the bottom.
