Noah Medical App Preview

Project Overview

MY ROLE Team Duration
UX Research, UI Design, Prototyping, Project Management Sungran Lee, Ola Kushnir 2 weeks (March 2022)

The Product

Noah is a mobile application that supports and guides breast cancer patients through their complex cancer therapy. It's being developed by the berlin-based company Noah Therapies, our client of this project. They are in the early development stage now. The core functionalities of Noah will include therapy appointment manager, medication planner, reminder, information section, symptom tracker and dashboard.

The Problem

Today, breast cancer patients have to cope with the complexity of highly individualized cancer therapy, and the resulting tasks. On top of that, they also need to take care of the emotional effects of cancer.
A holistic and personalized digital therapy guide that is uncomplicated and unobtrusive can help ease the heavy responsibilities of patients during the therapy.

The Challenge

Cancer therapy causes significant side effects that can affect patients’ quality of life and even lead to therapy interruptions, if not recognized and managed early and proactively.

“How might we create a symptom tracking feature that makes cancer care better?”

Problem Discovery

Patient (user) survey and interviews*

→ By taking a look at online cancer support communities (e.g. Facebook groups) first, we gathered information on how patients deal with breast cancer. Thanks to Kai who is a medical doctor and the co-founder of Noah Therapies, we could also find patients for our surveys and interviews. What have we learned about our users? Here are the key findings:
77% don’t use breast cancer apps.
They haven’t heard of such apps as they are relatively new to the market. Also, age can influence mobile apps usage in general.
50% of patients using such apps are dissatisfied with their current apps.
Some important functionalities such as therapy and medication planner are missing in most of those apps.
At the beginning of the cancer therapy, patients are very confused.
They need help to understand the disease, track appointments, plan their new routine, and get mental support.
During the therapy, patients suffer from ‘chemo brain’.
It can make their usual tasks such as organizing paperworks for the therapy and evaluating side effects more difficult.
Patients are ready to share personal health data anonymously in an app.
By sharing the data, they want to help other patients improve and manage their own health.

*14 survey participants and 2 interviewees

Competitive Analysis

General Information and Features

Noah Medical App Competitors

Visual Impression

Noah Medical App Competitors
→ We found out that there are not so many competitors on the current German market. We compared them with each other. What opportunities can we take advantage of?

Competitors lack some essential functionalities.

They’re oriented towards medical aspects only.

Chance: analyse mental & social factors to create functionalities that give emotional support.

Problem Definition

Empathy Map

→ We synthesized our research findings to better understand our users. Noah Medical App Empathy Map

Primary User Persona

Noah Medical App User Persona

Secondary User Persona

Noah Medical App User Persona2

Problem Statement

Breast cancer patients need to get well-informed about their current treatment in the most effective and less harmful way possible.

Both patients and the medical system live together on the same trajectory and share the same goal: healing.
It has proven difficult to propose patients appropriate interactive tools to self-evaluate relevant medical information, their current symptoms or their recent history. Also, it is critical that such an app could support them in planning their treatment activities.

Current web/apps’ UI may increase the negative effects of emotional load and therefore are not helpful for patients in keeping track of the large amount of different aspects, tasks and deadlines during their treatment.

Hypothesis Statement

If we provide our patients a set of transparent and uncomplicated tools which take into account not only the physical self, but also the mental and social factors, the patients will be supported and use the app regularly to evaluate and self-manage the complex treatment.

When we succeed in retaining 20-30 patients who use our app during their entire chemotherapy, we will have proven its usability and usefulness for breast cancer patients aged between 40-49.

Ideation

Annette’s User Flow

Noah Medical App User Flow

Low-fi Wireframes

Noah Health App Low Fideltiy Wireframes

Mid-fi Prototype

Noah Health App Mid Fidelity Prototype

Usability Test

→ We ran usability tests on the mid-fi. Some of the main issues we could identify are: Noah Medical App Mid Fidelity Prototype

Prototyping

Moodboard

→ Exploring the look & feel for our new UI design. Noah Medical App Moodboard

BRAND ATTRIBUTES

Caring

Open-minded

Ambitious

Responsible

Style Tile

→ We transformed our abstract visual explorations into concrete visual elements, illustrations and interactions that empower users to complete desired tasks and actions. The following colors and illustrations also represent the brand values such as care and responsibility. Noah Medical App Style Tile
Noah Health App High Fideliyty Prototype

High-fi Interactive Prototype

Conclusion

Results and impact

Users navigated more confidently through the screens after fixing the issues we found in the mid-fi. Increasing the visual weight by adding colors and illustrations in the hi-fi significantly improved users’ understanding of the functionalities.

Main challenge and lesson learnt

The discovery phase was very challenging as we had to find users (=breast cancer patients) who are willing to participate in our surveys and interviews in the short term. Ultimately, we could successfully conduct our research and it was very insightful.

Next steps

– Check for color accessibility and improve it.

– Continue testing with users.

– Create microinteractions for the symptom progress trends.

– Brainstorm and gather ideas how to make a feature that facilitates symptom reporting directly from the user to the health care team.