Case Study: Thrive Mobile App & Health Service
Project Overview
Key Challenges
& Restraints
Thyroid patients expressed a need to track health metrics from different sources, and want to get insights from doing so. Also, those interviewed stated that they were not best served by traditional doctors.
Target Audience
Women over age 25 with diagnosed thyroid disease as this group is historically underrepresented in medical research.
Project Goal
Design a mobile solution that enables real-time data collection and overlays data in order to achieve insights. The solution must be able to track as many health metrics as the user requires.
The Product
Thrive is designed to capture health data as it happens, and provide health insights that can’t be achieved on paper, physician’s portal, or spreadsheet to better manage chronic conditions. In addition to health tracking, Thrive connects patients to doctors who can treat their conditions and a patient community.
My Role
UX designer leading Thrive's app research and design
Responsibilities
Conducting interviews, paper and digital wireframing, low and high-fidelity prototyping, conducting usability studies, accounting for accessibility, iterating on designs and mobile design
Project Duration
January 2022-present
Understanding the User
I conducted 6 interviews with chronically ill patients and their caregivers.
I decided to focus on women over age 25 with diagnosed thyroid disease as this
group is historically underrepresented in medical research. Also, women are five to
eight times more likely than men to have thyroid problems, and one woman in eight
will develop a thyroid disorder during her lifetime.1
Additionally, women are more prone to use digital health technology.2
Some assumptions included the participants had satisfactorily used a mobile app for health management in the past.
During the interviews, I learned that this set of patients prefers a highly interactive experience to help them
understand their health highs and lows and that they were motivated to use an app that could manage more
than one condition.
11https://www.thyroid.org/media-main/press-room/
2https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7500(21)00118-7/fulltext
User Pain Points
Mixed formats for tracking data
Paper and spreadsheet tracking is cumbersome and physician portals do not combine different specialists’ data in a single view. Patients expect a certain amount of interactivity in apps to help with compliance.
Connecting changes with outcomes
Patients can’t always tell what changes in their health regimen lead to the best/worst outcomes.
Lacking insights
The tracking that patients do lack insights into their complex conditions. There is a lot of overlap in symptoms and conditions.
Easy to forget objective history
Patients are frustrated when attending routine appointments and forgetting important health history. Having a single source could help make conversations and appointments more productive.
Persona & Problem Statement
Taylor is a mother with newly diagnosed with Hashimoto's disease who needs to track her health data because she wants to understand her symptom triggers.
User Journey Map
I created an empathy map to identify Taylor's pain points and possible improvement opportunities. One main theme from user research showed that chronically ill patients want to be able to record symptoms to understand patterns and to discuss these patterns with their doctors. This user journey map shows Taylor’s emotional journey as she uses the app.
Paper Wireframes
I sketched out paper wireframes for each screen in my app, keeping the user pain points in mind.
These paper wireframes explore different home screen layouts that enhance user enjoyment and usability through the use of visuals. The use of cards are intended to display frequently updated visualizations for each symptom area.
Thrive aims to address thyroid patients' need for a mobile centralized health tracking system.
On the home screen, patients can access any one of their symptom categories or data visualizations.
Design System
