Case study: Designing an app to combat Prediabetes

A UI/UX Case study on designing an app to combat Prediabetes, and reduce the number of Kaiser Permanente prediabetic patients

This was the capstone project I conducted when undertaking a Product Manager Nanodegree program with Udacity. Although the program incorporated product management terminologies and processes, I would exclude that for this case study focusing on the Product design phase of the project alone.

My Role — User Research, Sketch, UI/UX Design

Problem Statement by Udacity

The Research

Kaiser Permanente is one of the largest nonprofit healthcare plans in the United States, with over 12 million members. It operates 39 hospitals and more than 700 medical offices, with over 300,000 personnel, including more than 80,000 physicians and nurses.

I figured out that for Kaiser Permanente (- I’d use KP for short going forward) to decrease its spending on type 2 diabetes it had to consider preventing the recurrence of diabetes, rather than managing the situation.

To begin with, I first had to find out how massive the issue was, both financially and health-wise. I found out that, according to the Centre for Disease Control and American Diabetes Association, between 88–96 million Americans have Prediabetes — more than 1 in 3 — and without intervention, are likely to become Type 2 diabetes in 10 years.

Another study, in 2010, estimated that by the year 2050, 25–33% of American adults could have diabetes. Also, the American Diabetes Association stated that as of 2017, the economic (financial) cost of diabetes was $327B ($237B for direct Healthcare & $90B for reduced productivity), a 26% increase over a 5-year period, compared to $245B in 2012.

Note: The data from the American Diabetes Association is measured in a 5-year interval, so I utilized the most recent — 2017.

Competitive Analysis

I went on to analyze the difference between companies when it came to their approach to solving this problem. Two companies I found are:

1. BlueStar — a digital assistant for people with diabetes, it provides users with insights about how their food choices, medications, and activity affect their glucose patterns.
2. Glucose Buddy — an app that allows users to track blood sugar over time with weekly reports and action plans to keep their glucose in check.

Understanding the Problem

A series of questions were raised which I converted to How Might We statements for better innovative thinking:

1. How might we Prevent patients from making unhealthy choices?
2. How might we encourage people to take more water?
3. How might we reduce sedentarism?
4. How might we get people to build healthier habits?
5. How might we make patients more accountable?
6. How might we better help people understand diabetes?
7. How might we raise awareness across society?

Solution

Knowing that some causes of prediabetes include sedentary living, excess consumption of sugary beverages, and unhealthy eating; to counter this issue prevalent in the US, I based the solution on creating a mobile application that would help return KP prediabetic patients to normal health, having the following features:

• access to curated meal plans,
• access to exercise routines,
• access to a KP dietitian/nutritionist who would educate them on the nutritional value of the kinds of meals they should eat,
• blog posts relating to prediabetes prevention, and healthy eating

Sketch

Sketch of the application

Sketch of the application

Prototype

View the working prototype here👇:

s.mp4

Final Designs

Summary

It was an amazing experience working on this project as I got to empathize much more with the struggles prediabetic (as well as diabetic) patients go through daily.