Chronic-Wound Care Mobile App
A redesign of the MyWoundHealing app, a companion app to the world's most-used wound therapy machine. The goal: help patients undergoing wound therapy actually engage with the educational content built to support their recovery.
Organization
3M Healthcare
Services
Mobile app design
Role
UX designer
MY ROLE
End-to-end design process including information architecture, prototypes, 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
KEY INSIGHT 1
Getting to an answer took too many steps
User flow analysis showed that finding information on a single topic took more than two steps on average. For patients managing pain, fatigue, and anxiety about their wound, every extra tap was a reason to give up.
KEY INSIGHT 2
Relevant content was buried in irrelevant content
The app's educational library was organized around clinical categories, not patient needs. A patient searching for one specific concern — "Is this drainage normal?" — had no way to isolate it from unrelated content. Finding an answer meant digging through a wall of information that wasn't sequenced to where they actually were in their recovery.
THE RESEARCH
Validating the timeline problem with patients and providers
To confirm this, a 30 in-depth interviews with patients was conducted going through the wound care journey. 84% expressed a strong desire to better understand how to manage their own wound — but the app's flat, category-based structure wasn't built to answer that need at the right moment. A card sort with these patients confirmed what mattered most to them, stage by stage:
Interviews with nurses and healthcare providers echoed the same gap from the clinical side: patients were being sent home with too little preparation, then left to piece things together on their own.
MARKET RESEARCH
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. Informed by competitive research, I built many, many, many variations of the education content before settling on a final design.
Three principles guided the design:
Personalized content — surfaced by therapy stage, not clinical category
Gamification — to increase engagement
Bite-sized information — breakdown content into digestible information
THE SOLUTION
Designing the wound care app around the patient's timeline
RESULT
The concept was presented to internal and external stakeholders and is now live on Google Play and the Apple App Store. The project advanced to MVP.
REFLECTION
Key Learnings
1. Understanding service design: Taking a step back to learn about the complexity of the healthcare ecosystem and the full end-to-end patient journey.
2. I felt grateful I get to work with an amazing, talented team in the Healthcare Division. Below is a screenshot of a meeting with the healthcare design team and external stakeholders. I learned a lot from everyone that I've worked with.
3M INTERN COHORT
