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Care Clique Case Study
Bringing my UX Design journey to a close at BrainStation, this case study for my capstone project will showcase my entire UX Design process. I created and designed Care Clique, an app to help users, such as dialysis patients, have the freedom to express themselves, connect with others, navigate their schedules better, and even have family and friends help them by completing tasks off of their todo list. Take a deep dive into how the research, planning, ideation, design, and hi-fi production all came together.
Project Overview
Industry: Healthcare
Duration: 10 weeks
Role: UX Designer, UI Designer, UX Researcher
Platform: Android
Tools: Figma, Invision, Google Docs
The Challenge
Problem Space
Through secondary research, I found that dialysis patients are increasingly experiencing mental and emotional distress due to the inability to find shared support and connection among others. To look further into this problem space I found the following statistics.
Secondary Research
This made it clear why the top complaints among dialysis patients are…
Time commitment: 23% of patients reported difficulty going to dialysis treatments, and 24% reported having difficulty completing their full treatment session.
Impact on Family, Social, and Love Life: Having family, friends, and partner/spouse be able to understand the effects of dialysis proved to be extremely difficult.
A burden to Others: No longer being able to do a lot of the things they were used to, many patients struggled to now have to rely on others for help due to their disease.
By exploring this problem space, I was looking to find an outcome that would benefit the user in the ability to have an outlet that would relieve the emotional and mental load they carry. Through continued UX Research and Design, I wanted to be able to solve this issue.
Detailing the Problem
As a former Healthcare worker specifically in a dialysis facility, I had a birds-eye view of what dialysis patients day to day struggles were, many of them were indeed suffering from depression and anxiety due to how much dialysis impacted their life.
Problem Space Hypothesis
While I had gathered secondary research, it was still limited in the data provided. I however could begin to hypothesize that [finding and creating a way for dialysis patients to be supported emotionally and mentally by others through a digital platform, would lead them to be more vocal in expressing themselves and provide an outlet for them] thus reducing their emotional and mental distress. I would know if this were to be true when patient assessments were conducted and the overall quality of life statistics showed improvements in this area.
The Research
Primary Research
With a hypothesis in mind, I needed to know how or if this could be potentially validated. So in order to be sure of what direction I would go in for my design I conducted interviews via zoom for approximately 30 mins with current and/or recently transplanted dialysis patients. This allowed me the ability to see if what I had hypothesized and assumed was indeed true.
Using the interviewees' pain points, behaviors and motivations, I initially thought after creating my affinity map my theme was “connecting with others” which lead me down a path of thinking users would have wanted to connect more with peers and others to have an opportunity to have more of a social and dating life.
However, after more research and looking further into the other themes I already had, I found that ultimately it was the theme that centered around “ Lack of Education and Support” that was my user’s biggest pain point.
Some of the interview questions I asked.
How long have you been on dialysis?
How has dialysis changed your life?
What type of support system do you currently have?
How does dialysis affect your social life?
Has it been easy or difficult for people to understand your situation?
If there was anything you could change as it relates to dialysis, whether it be in terms of education, lifestyle, social, or anything overall, what would it be?
Affinity map
Click to zoom
Key Insights
Some of the key insights I found throughout my chosen theme were.
Friends didn't understand why he was tired all the time.
Would have to often explain to their fiancé, he just didn't feel good and was tired.
Would have liked more understanding from peers.
Would like to have more help with things they aren't able to do anymore or are too tired to do after treatment.
Persona
Now that I had gathered all of this information and data between the secondary and primary research, I was able to create my persona. My persona represented who my intended target user would ultimately be.
Opportunity
Capturing all the interviewees' pain points, I was able to identify the gap which I could potentially fill. I was able to visually create and show my user's current state experience and created an Experience Map. This allowed me to see that I could design an app that not only allowed my user to express and share their thoughts openly but could also be able to receive help that wouldn’t make them feel like a burden to others.
How Might We
This led me to wonder, How Might We help dialysis patients gain a support system that understands their dialysis process in order to improve their quality of life and reduce their mental and emotional stress?
Ideation
User Stories and Core Epic
In order to put myself into my persona’s shoes, I created some user stories that could help me focus and specify the needs of the user. User stories are formulated using the formula of.
As a….I want to…so that.
Once I created my users' stories I was able to choose a Core Epic. I found that the most dominant user story theme was “staying connected”.
Task Flow
Having more insight into what my user needed, I was able to create a task flow. This showed the flow of how the user would navigate through the app based on their specific needs.
In the case of “ staying connected” I wanted the user to be able to document or share their day-to-day feelings with family and friends in order to express how they felt and ultimately be able to receive help as well in return without feeling like they are a burden.
Mood and UI Board
To gather inspiration for my design I created both a Mood and UI board. This helped me to see what type of mood I wanted my design to have and what type of visual components, and elements, among other functionalities I wanted to contribute to the design.
Mood board
UI Board
Sketching
Pulling from my UI board, I started sketching design solutions. This allowed me to visually see how different ideas and content placement would look. Ultimately this pointed me in a direction where I could easily see the layout and flow that would work best for my target user.
Wireframes
For my design solution phase, I had two phases. One started with the initial set of grayscale wireframes, which were then made to be an interactive prototype.
User Testing
Now that the first phase of wire-framing was completed, I wanted to get some user feedback. I tested my initial prototype with 5 users, which allowed me to know what areas were the most problematic or confusing within the design. The goal for the user was to see if they could complete a series of tasks without any missteps or confusion along the way. After conducting the first round of user testing, I found that while overall users were able to get through the app, there was some confusion and areas of concern. When it came to completing the task of how a user could help the main user complete a task from their to-do list, it wasn’t clear, nor was it clear what would happen next.
After receiving that feedback, I implemented some changes that would now make that transition and flow clear. Once completed, I conducted a second round of user testing with five different users. With two rounds of user testing completed, and the second round faring better than the first, I took the remaining feedback received from my second round of user testing and implemented those changes as well to revise my prototype.
Visual Identity Story
Finally reaching the phase to be able to bring my design to life by making it Hi-Fi, I first needed to create my visual identity. I wanted to capture different ideas of what brand identity would be by highlighting the feel and tone that would invoke reactions within my users when interacting with the app.
I started with a few adjectives such as these, just to name a few.
Friendly, Supportive, Positive, Optimistic, Sociable.
Next, to narrow the scope of what I intended for my brand, I created a more A than B list. This was a list of adjectives used on a compare and contrast scale.
More supportive than discouraging
More hopeful than sad
More Trustworthy than doubtful
Brand Name Exploration
Now it was time to explore a name for my brand. A few names came to mind initially.
Simple Connect, Social Circle, Care Clique.
To ensure that I would be picking a name that would resonate with my users, I asked several of my peers which name resonated with them and that they felt represented my brand the most. Care Clique received the highest rating.
Emotional Color Theory
From my mood board, I was able to extract many colors, however, my main two colors were blue and green.
Green is the color of life and is often associated with health, and hope for a better future.
Orange/Burnt Orange color promotes rejuvenation, positivity, and optimism
Brand Color Exploration
To ensure that everyone, no matter their situation would not have any issues when it came to accessibility, I made sure my brand colors met the required accessibility standards of WCAG.
Brand Typography Exploration
While searching through various font styles for inspiration, I found I was most drawn to Open Sans, Lato, and Arial styles.
Chosen typeface.
Hi- Fi Prototype
See Static Screens in next section
Home Screen
Create Profile and Select Condition
Successful Profile Creation
Let's Invite Family & Friends
Create your first interactive post
Let's Chat
Todlist
Calendar
Product Marketing
Now that my product was developed in High-Fidelity, the next challenge was to design a responsive website experience to promote my designed application to my target audience. After gaining more ideas and inspiration from my extended Mood and UI Boards, I was able to have a more clear design concept for how I wanted Care Clique’s website to look. Knowing my target user/audience would be that of a much more emotional, serious, delicate demographic. I wanted to make sure the website was simple, clean, and straight to the point of understanding exactly what my product was about and the benefits.
Application Expansion
Moving forward I would like to see my application on a tablet device. With dialysis patients spending a substantial amount of time completing their treatment, they could use this time to further explore and spend time on Care Clique.
Next Steps & Key Learnings
Next Steps
Since my application has the ability to improve a person’s quality of life, it’s super that I continue to improve upon the functionality of my application to ensure that users are getting the best user experience possible.
Key Learnings
Creating my very first functional app has been quite a journey! While rewarding, it did come with challenges that I learned can happen very quickly and unexpectedly, however, I learned it's all about how you “PIVOT”! I’ve learned how to take the “you” out of user experience and really focus on what the user needs versus what I think they need. Not being afraid to receive feedback from those around me such as my peers proved vital in improving my overall product. I am looking forward to what lies ahead and excited about where my next design will take me!
Thank you for reading my case study for Care Clique, hope you’ve enjoyed it!
Kemisha Cross | UX Designer