Tools
Balsamiq
Sketch/inVision
Adobe Illustrator

Timeframe
Jun - Aug 2019
UI/UX Design Intern @ IBM

Our intern team at IBM focused on creating an offering that will help Indian citizens better manage and understand diabetes and the effects it could have on their health.

How might we use IoT and blockchain to address the diabetes epidemic in India?
How might we design a new offering that can be taken to market by IBM Blockchain Services?

India's consumer pool will be the largest in Emerging Asia and worldwide by 2050, serving as an attractive investment opportunity.

Given that most transactions in developing nations are now completed via networked connections, IBM Blockchain & IoT Services would like to create a compelling new offer to tap this nascent market by reaching millions of users.

We’ve developed a diabetes-specific wellness program that can be sold to other corporations, B2B. It provides an untapped market opportunity.

The service consists of an IoT device and a user-facing app component. It provides vertically integrated diabetes management to patients employed by large corporations. The management app allows users to sync and track diabetes related data, have telemedicine appointments and share medical record with other people.

While we all worked together on the research, ideation and visual design phases. As the UX Design intern on the team, I was mainly responsible for designing and creating the wireframes as well as the high-fidelity prototype of the offering.

Research Phase
Stakeholder interviews, secondary research, competitive analysis, user persona, as-it story, help with research synthesis and list constraints and opportunities for product’s roadmap.

Ideation Phase
Summarize needs statement, prioritization grids, prioritizing important features and prepare user scenarios.

Prototyping Phase
Build wireframes, create user flows for different features, user test the flows and iterate from feedback and design final prototypes. Creating a visual design guideline to ensure the design system is cohesive throughout the platform.

Motion Design
Design micro-interactions for final presentation.

Secondary Research:

• Use cases of blockchain and IoT in healthcare

• Healthcare system, record keeping and internet/technology penetration in India

• Value proposition of the new offering

• Competitive analysis on existing diabetes related products

• The role each stakeholder plays in the ecosystem (shown below)

Semi-structured Interviews:

>> INSIGHT 1 Patients want tasks to be simpler

"Right now, [diabetes] is just a really fragmented, confusing experience"

The healthcare experience in India is too fragmented, and patients want tasks to be simpler. For every physician in India, there are over 1500 patients. Their current doctor appointments have on average 1-1.5 hours waiting time.

>> Solution

>> INSIGHT 2 Patients are tired of antiquated record keeping

“I don’t know where my medical record is. And for each new doctor appointment, I need to fill all the information again.

The use of electronic health record is very limited in India. A lot of people still rely on paper records, which can easily get lost. Duplicated copies with incorrect information exist as well.

>> Solution

Use blockchain to build a secure network that connects patients with doctors and family members, enabling distributed and secure access to patient health data & record across the distributed ledger

>> INSIGHT 3 Patients have low awareness of diabetes

"I don't feel that I have any symptoms when I stop taking medication"

Patients don't understand or aren't motivated to care about the effects diabetes can have on them. More than two-third of diabetes patients remained undiagnosed in India. And around 1/2 of the diagnosed cases were in uncontrolled.

>> Solution

>> INSIGHT 4 B2B Diabetes Wellness Program provides an untapped Market in India

B2B, diabetes-specific wellness program doesn’t exist in India, which provides an untapped market opportunity.

>> Solution

Offer a corporate wellness program that provides vertically integrated diabetes management to patients employed by large corporations. With the wellness program, working adults spend more time at work than in any other setting, and corporations are seeing the value helping guide employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle. In addition, for every dollar spent on employee wellness programs, $3.27 are saved on healthcare for employees, which provides another incentive for corporations.

Meet Alisha, Type 2 Diabetes Patient, Dr. Rina, Diabetes Specialists and Krish, Corporate Wellness Directors at the company.

Some key takeaways here include:

Feature 3 -

Sync

Users can add their glucose level, food intake, physical activity or medication to the app by easily syncing their IoT devices such as smart glucose monitors and smartwatches.

Feature 4 -

Doctor network

Users get access to a network of physicians on the app.

The option of telemedicine is provided here, so that users can see their doctors via the app.

Feature 5 -

Share

Users will get access to their visit summary from previous doctor visits.

After they open the documentation, they can share the information with other doctors and their family members.

Feature 6 -

Reward

Users can earn points and collect badges by meeting different milestones such as add 5 glucose logs. They can redeem the points for devices such as apple watch and fit-bit.

We made quite a few pivots over the course of the project, mainly because we were trying to find the right scope for such broad problem.

We were told multiple times by other designers during this project,

'don't boil the ocean',

and we realized we were tackling a very large problem that we couldn't ever totally understand in this timeframe. It is really important to narrow down to the targeted problem spaces and user groups during the research phase. Finding the right scope at early stages can save more time for user testings later.