OVERVIEW

In this research, I designed an IOS mobile app for senior citizens to not only remind them take the right medicine on time, also provide some advanced features to improve medication adherence and health care experience.
The design is based on background research, initial interview, and competitor analysis. Then Persona, Use Cases, Scenarios, Wireframe, Sketches and high fidelity design are generated.

THE IDEA CAME TO MY MIND...

When I was living with my grandparents, I found that one important daily schedule for them was reminding each other to take medicine on time. However, they still missed some accidentally. And when they went to see the doctor, the doctor often asked them about recent feeling, what medicine they took recently, and then made some changes of the prescription. So an idea came to my mind: why not provide a special alarm app for people like them to improve medication adherence?
With this idea in mind, I found some facts (1) about medication adherence which make me more eager to design such an app:

• 39% of people aged 65+ take 5 medications or more every day (info from MyMeds)
• Only 50% of patients who suffer from chronic diseases adhere to treatment recommendations, World Health Organization, 2003
• 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug and more than 50% take two or more drugs (info from Care4today)
• In the US, medication nonadherence costs more than $100 billion annually
• Yearly non-adherence causes 125,000 deaths (info from Medisafe)

METHOD & PROCESS

To design an app that aims to help elder people improve their medication adherence, I did some background research about the medication adherence problem, conducted interviews to understand their needs and habits. I also did analysis on some existing med-care apps to see what are already in the market and what are still needed.
Based on all the information collected, I designed the app from the scenarios, structure, sketches, wireframes, finally built the prototype with several updates.

UNDERSTAND TAEGET USERS - PERSONA

I interviewed three senior citizens who need to take different medicine everyday.
Consider that for most elder people, there are more (physical and mental) constraints on learning and accepting new product, the interview was focused on understanding:

• Their habits about medicine taking
• Their needs
• Their thinking about having an app to facilitate them
• Any concern that will stop them from using such an alarm app

COMPETITIVE PRODUCT ANALYSIS

Because limited people were interviewed, I want to collect more information from existing related apps which are used by the public to help form the idea.
Based on searching top "Trusted Apps For Seniors to Manage Medications" in google and in app store, four (Round, Medisafe, Care4today, CareZone) of the most popular apps were analyzed in this research.
The goal is to:

• understand what kinds of function are usually provided and popular in this type of app
• Understand why people like/dislike the app

Several common features of the selected apps and customer review posted on the app store were collected and analyzed.

The most useful reviews (+ positive, - negative) of these 4 apps have been trunked, categorize and merged.Here is a quick summary:

Medisafe: is good at the reminder and history functions.

Round: is really good at user experience. There are much more comments about how easy to use the app than for the functions. But in my opinion, there is one imperfect feature in Round: the 24 hour clock visualization with color coding is kind of confusing to understand and find the starting point.

Care4today’s reminder function is fine. But the development quality of the app is not good enough and is complained by many users.

CareZone’s reminder and history function seem also good, but there are too much Adds and redundant information.

According to the categorized result shown in the chart, the parts that people care more about are reminder with snooze function, history review, appointment reminder, and help family members. Users care details and flexibility about the reminder part. Simple and clean UI is also an really important factor for people to choose apps.

USE CASES & STRUCTURE

The cost of nonadherence to prescribed medications is high (2). According to the persona and Competitive Product Analysis, I think the pain point for people start using the Medicine alarm app is 1. How to prevent from forgetting taking medicine. 2. If forgot, how to fix it. There are some detailed cases, such as taking medicine later, reviewing, or asking a doctor etc.
The main use cases:

1. Schedule:
Add medicines & set up alarms

2. Alarm:
Send alarm notification;
allow the user to snooze,
took the medicine later,
and confirm

3. Review & check:
Allow the user to review history record,
and get instant feedback from the doctor

SKETCH & HI-FI

Based on the structures and user flow, I sketched different design ideas to cover each use case. For example, I created circular, group, and time line version for the day view visualization with different types of medicine notification card. “Round” app also provides 24-hour circular clock as visualization. But when I tried to use it, I found it was not easy to understand where to start reading the clock. And the interaction and color coding of medicine are confusing. This also remind me to provide the legend when using the linear visualization version.
For the group version, although it shows the medicine group clearly. But elder people are more care about when to taking medicines and the sequence. What’s more, the group one is hard to show multiple groups (>4). So finally I choose the linear one, and merged reasonable functions from other versions considering all usability and experience factors. Finally the high fidelity prototype is made using Sketch.

IMPROVEMENTS & TAKEAWAYS

This project is more focused on interviewing, analyzing current existing products, reports, and try to have improvement in a new app. Analysis customer review is an interesting way to get feedback. It reveals what most customers are interested in, but maybe hard to get feedback for a specific section. After the design has been done, if have more time, I’d like to build interactive prototype and conduct usability tests with real target user. For short term, we can measure whether the voice input method improve the UX for elder people, whether the visualization report provides funny facts to senior citizens, whether the chat system provide a convenient platform for patients and Doctors etc. In a long term, we can know whether this app improve medication adherence or not, and what improvement I can make.

SAMPLE INTERFACES

Interaction

Take medicine

Notification & Chat

References

(1) 5-Trusted-Apps-For-Seniors-to-Manage-Your-Medications (https://www.homeover55.com/articles/2016-03-18/5-Trusted-Apps-For-Seniors-to-Manage-Your-Medications)
(2)The Cost of Not Taking Your Medicine (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/well/the-cost-of-not-taking-your-medicine.html)

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