My Daily Symptom Trackers 1.0

SMS trackers for chronic conditions that help patients visualize symptoms, identify flares and take control of their treatment plan

Overview

Living with a chronic condition creates emotional, mental and health challenges from early diagnosis to living with advanced stages. It's common to feel overwhelmed and like the condition is controlling your life. Tracking symptoms and flares to proactively manage your health, in partnership with your medical team, helps create a new "normal” but there are many patient barriers to condition management.

My Daily Symptom Trackers are mobile trackers that facilitate symptom, pain and medicine tracking with the goal of improving patient outcomes. I led Design for my team which launched 3 betas (v1.0) for Rheumatoid Arthritis, Type 2 Diabetes and Crohn’s Disease. Patients rate how they feel on a scale of 1 to 5 through text message and track condition-specific symptoms on their unique dashboard. The dashboard saves daily inputs and creates a weekly overview with insights and personalized content recommendations and tips based on how the week went. By identifying patterns during flares, patients gain insights into how their lifestyle and behaviors impact their condition and vice versa. This helps patients have better-informed conversations with their healthcare team for a successful treatment plan.

Role

Product Design
UX & UI Design
Art Direction
Email Design

Platform

Text Messaging
Responsive Web
Email Marketing

Date

2017

It Takes a Village

Christine Fitts, UX Research
Kemar Swaby, UX Designer
Carolyn Marconi, UX Designer
Katy Merlo, Product Manager
Maharsh Desai, Tech Lead
Linda Lieu, Back End
Viral Bhagat, Front End
Yuliya Knep, QA

The Challenge

Design, develop & launch in 3 months

My Daily Symptom Trackers were conceived as an innovation product we wanted to quickly launch, test, gather learnings from and optimize. My team had to design, build and launch 3 betas for Rheumatoid Arthritis, Type 2 Diabetes and Crohn’s Disease in only 3 months (Q1). Tech didn't have any existing framework or SMS platform we could leverage so it was all hands on deck between UXDesign, Product and Engineering - a true example of agile.

Teamwork makes the dream work

By keeping our working team small we successfully stayed agile and collaborated, self-organized, mitigated blockers, adapted, iterated and launched on time. The team consisted of Product, UX Research, Design (me), Front and Back-End Engineers. Our cross-functional collaboration extended to additional departments including Editorial, Marketing Strategy, Sales and AdOps when appropriate.

I led design throughout the lifecycle from sketching to wireframing and creating medium-fidelity prototypes and final designs, iterating based on user testing. I worked side-by-side with the developers to overcome challenges and limitations, provide feedback, make updates and put the final touches on all interactions to ensure a usable and functional MVP.

MVP: Defining our feature-set

Defining a core experience grounded in user research was pivotal to the success of our new product. Participating in patient and doctor interviews gave me insight into the challenges and barriers that prevent patients from better managing chronic conditions.

Our trackers had to be easy to use and personalized in order to encourage daily engagement and develop long-term retention. Integrating text messaging required a high level of tech effort, but it was a crucial engagement driver for our product. Together, we mapped our end-to-end user experience, taking into account all user flows and corresponding logic, which defined our requirements, project timeline and tech sprints.

Step 1: Sign up

To use My Daily Symptom Trackers users have to sign up and create an account. I designed a signup page that was scalable to all 3 conditions: Rheumatoid Arthritis, Type 2 Diabetes and Crohn’s Disease. My goal was to convey patient benefits, ease of use and how the program works (FAQ section). The screens below showcase some of the use cases I designed for.

Daily tracking at your fingertips

By integrating text messaging, we enabled frictionless tracking and were able to easily remind and encourage users to track symptoms in order to gain valuable insights in the future.

We sent daily texts asking users to rate their day on a scale from 1 (struggling) to 5 (great). For MVP we customized messages based on day of the week. After users text back, their responses are tracked on their personalized dashboard which they can easily access via the provided Bitlink.

User-friendly tracking

As part of the visual system, I designed animated emojis to correspond with numbers 1 through 5 for each day rating. I wanted to emotionally connect with users and deviate from the sterile, clipboard, pen-on-paper tracking they’re accustomed to in doctor's offices.

Whether a user rated their day through text message, email or directly on our website, the corresponding emoji would be selected on their dashboard’s daily view for that day. Users can also log their symptoms, triggers, wins and additional notes for each day.

Condition-specific trackers

Each of the 3 symptom trackers had condition-specific trackers in addition to symptoms, triggers and wins. This includes a pain tracker (Rheumatoid Arthritis and Crohn's Disease), a blood sugar level tracker (Type 2 Diabetes) and a loose stool tracker (Crohn's Disease). I also designed corresponding icons to visualize these logged inputs on the dashboard.

Medication tracker

A patient with a chronic condition tries various medications based on severity of symptoms, progression or advancement of illness.

With our medication tracker, users can keep an up-to-date record of current medications taking or considering, and share with their healthcare team. This feature is linked to Everyday Health’s drug database so that users can search medications, read reviews and download coupons or discount cards for specific drugs!

Weekly insights and reports

My Daily Symptom Trackers generates a weekly report that visualizes how the week went from Monday through Sunday. This overview summarizes total number of good and bad days and sorts symptoms, triggers and wins in descending order of frequency. Personalized tips and reading recommendations are generated each week to help users manage their logged symptoms and triggers.

The weekly view also aggregates all daily ratings since the start of the program and creates an average quality-of-life score for each day of the week. This breakdown can help users identify behavioral and social patterns that may trigger flares.

Empowering patients to share insights and take charge of their doctor visits

The weekly report can be shared through email or printed in order to prepare for a doctor's appointment. During patient interviews, I learned that doctor visits only last 15-20 minutes. Having documentation helps patients guide the conversation during their short doctor visits if they have difficulties between appointments. From the doctor's perspective, daily self-tracking provides them a holistic view of their patient and gives them insights into the daily lives and activities that may be triggering flares.

Leveraging email as an additional user touchpoint

I designed a suite of email templates for My Daily Symptom Trackers. This includes a welcome email, a daily email to remind users to rate their day and a weekly report email. Users could opt out of emails if they preferred to receive reminders through text by changing their preferences in their Everyday Health account.

Getting the word out

Our marketing KPIs for My Daily Symptom Trackers consisted of growth (signups) and retention (return users). We promoted each tracker via newsletters and social media including Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram. We strategically planned our promotions around seasonal changes and holidays that could affect symptoms and triggers flares for each condition. Under my creative direction, the design team designed promo images that were consistent with the visual language I created for the trackers.

Impactful user feedback

We received really positive user feedback after launching our 3 betas into the wild. Many users reported how useful they found the trackers in helping them reflect on the impact their condition has on their daily lives. In general, they also loved the texting feature and felt it was well suited to a busy lifestyle. Below are several highlights from our users:

My Daily Diabetes helps me understand MY diabetes better.

In January when I feel awful due to the weather, it helps to look back at October, when I was feeling better in order to remember that things are temporary and that I'll feel better in April again.

Being able to track how often my symptoms occur helps me realize I wasn't having as many flares as I thought.

I really like that I can track ‘wins’ in My Daily Diabetes. I enter all kinds of other details about my day… It wasn't a great day for me but it allows you take some wins still. I would characterize that step as much more uplifting than I thought it would be.