Summary
Designed a skin-cancer prevention solution for a health-care startup which allows user to observe and track skin-care issues. The data collected will enable health-care providers to actively monitor high-risk individual. The entire design sprint was completed in 3 days.
Problem
Design a value added service for an existing health-care startup to provide its users who are identified as high-risk individuals, options to enroll in the active monitoring plans.
Solution
Delivered a concept for a subscription based service for a preventable high-risk issue - skin-cancer. The service enables users to actively document and communicate with physicians, while reducing dependency on regular visits and reducing the associated costs. Also, demonstrated the scalability of UI component for other preventable issues like diabetes and heart-health.
Project Team
Members: Product manager, Health-care SME and Myself
Tools Used
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Google slides
My role
UX & UI design (concept sketch to high-fidelity mockups)
Duration
3 days
Introduction
In United states a large section of population is dissatisfied with the existing healthcare system. While there are many issues to focus on, research has shown that higher levels of spending on primary care can lead to improved patient outcomes and lower overall health-care costs through early detection and treatment of disease. So we are going to analyze and propose an app based solution that can potentially provided immediate remedy to this issue.
Research
Based on insights provided by the healthcare expert on the team, frequent primary care visits are done for severe flu, recurring visits by customers on watch for cancer, diabetes or blood-pressure concerns. We focused on skin cancer prevention care, as other ailments have products to measure & record the status of the conditions, like a personal thermometer for recording temperature for flu, bpm from a fitness tracker or blood sugar reading from portable glucometer. We can create a dashboard to pool data from personal fitness and health-care products to monitor diabetes and blood-pressure issues. But skin cancer prevention care would require a new system to record and organize information.
To model our persona, we asked what a high-risk individual's thought process is.
Persona & Customer Journey
To visualize the pain-points and delight in the process of a patient visiting a primary care location, we mapped customer journey of our persona Jessie who has been identified as a High-Risk individual making a quarterly visit to get her skin checked for cancer.
While we mapped the entire journey for better context, we focused only on the recording and observation of skin issues for our case study as other problems were already being addressed by the startup's other product offerings. Active monitoring and streamlining observation method for skin-cancer care can help the user avoid a doctor visit in the first place or provide avenues for remote virtual primary care.
Why a Skin Care Journal?
National organizations such as the American Academy of Dermatology and the Skin Cancer Foundation advocate advanced screening as effective method to prevent skin cancer. Skin cancer seems easy to detect early because it is visible; skin examinations are neither painful nor invasive; and melanoma thickness at the time of diagnosis predicts mortality. Skin cancer treatments cost the United States more than $8 billion each year, making skin cancer the fifth most costly cancer for Medicare. After analyzing the various product offering in the market, we found that regardless of these data about skin-cancer, there has been no effective service providing skin-cancer prevention care. We designed a solution for this opportunity, as this can also serve as USP for our product.
Wireframe
After analyzing the user journey we decided to solve for the opportunity to create a service for recording and tracking skin issues. We chose this aspect to demonstrate feasibility of creating a digital product for skin cancer prevention and provide a vision for the final product. Also, because this service is relatively new and exploratory in nature compared to diabetes and heart-health management.
User flow
The process of adding an entry in the journal is a simplified 3-step process of capture-tag-review. The data recorded will give qualitative as well as quantitative data of the skin spot observed.
We also envisioned areas of opportunity to implement machine-learning (ML) solutions in the product, like providing guidance to capture consistent images and automatically detecting changes in images when same location is recorded again.
Intention behind the UI
Apart from capturing images for screening, the design included basic questions regarding the particular area. This way we can also capture additional data for future reference. Every component in the screen was based on a card-based UI so that its reusable and easily scalable for other features.
Dynamic viewing options
While the regular operational view provides a chronological presentation of all the skin issues recorded. We also provide an analytical view to check all entries by specific body locations recorded in the journal. This will also help in easily observing any physical progression of the skin spots/moles in the images of a particular location manually or by using ML based solution.
Vision for other add-on services
While we did not explore in details the other possibilities to tackle diabetes and heart-health, I created mock-ups based on inputs from the health-care expert on the team for the main dashboard views to provide a vision for how they might look. This also helped in demonstrating a consistent visual aesthetics for the different UI and data visualization related to the different add-on services planned.
A Dashboard for the Doctor
For the user on the other end, I created a desktop based dashboard which would aggregate data from different users under a single program and streamline the workflow for the medical practitioners to easily keep track of their patients.
Outcomes
- Our solution converts the patient from a passive role to a more active role in the skin-cancer screening process which will help in providing early interventions.
- The data collected will help physicians to actively monitor and recommend intermediate visits or provide more affordable remote sessions for better skin-cancer prevention care coverage.
Apart from the UX & UI design, I also supported to provide illustrations for the presentation deck. The idea was pitched to the leadership team and received positive feedback. I got appreciation for delivering a clean and intuitive interface in such a short span. If provided with the opportunity I would have loved to test and get feedback from actual users.
This project was recognized as the best student project in Spring 2021
