Dupage Dietitians
A web application geared for healthcare management
Project Brief
Our team of three UX designers collaborated with Dupage Dietitians, a team of dietitians that work closely with hundreds of patients in minority communities who are suffering from long-term health issues like diabetes, cancer, obesity, asthma, and more. Their goal is to work with patients to take control of their health. Dupage Dietitians tasked us to design a web application empowering dieticians to digitally manage their clients.
Skills & Tools
Report Writing
User Interview
Affinity Mapping
Comparative Analysis
Persona Development
Wireframing
User Flows
Sketching
Prototyping
Role & Timeline
Research Lead | January 23, 2024 - February 9, 2024
Research
As the research lead for this project, I adopted three research methods for our research plan. This plan included secondary research, comparative/competitive analysis and user interviews.
Secondary Research
We delved into health and fitness statistics, discovering the below information.
These statistics demonstrate that a majority of Americans do not fully understand their nutritional intake and the guidance of a dietician could prove beneficial.
To design for users of the modern age, we wanted to incorporate any potential Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make our web application as competitive as possible with current dietitian web applications available.
However, after conducting substantive secondary research regarding privacy and AI regarding healthcare, we found that we would be violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) if we moved forward with incorporating an AI chat feature.
Currently, OpenAI will not sign a business associate agreement with any HIPAA-related organization, therefore ChatGPT cannot be used for any electronic protected health information (ePHI).
Because of this conflict, we decided not to add in a ChatGPT or AI feature in our web application to protect patients from any potential privacy concerns or violations.
Comparative/Competitive Analysis
We conducted a competitive analysis with similar platforms and competitors like Fitness Pal, Health Loft and Nourish. This allowed us to pinpoint the essential features of a food tracking site, an exercise tracking log and other dietitian web applications.
Please see the chart below.
Following this analysis, we concluded that the Dupage Dietitians web application is currently lacking quite a few features compared to its competitors. Some of these elements include a client progress tracker, personalized notifications, workout guides, meal planning, interactive tools and community features.
User Interviews
User interviews are essential to the UX design process as we speak directly to users in order to discover their pain points.
In order to garner a substantive pool of participants helpful to our research process, we needed to create a screener survey to send out wide before narrowing down our official list of interview participants.
The screener survey helped us narrow in on participants we would like to include with the following criteria:
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Must be health conscious
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Must actively use platforms to support healthy living
Additionally, the screener survey helped us narrow in on participants we wanted to exclude with the following criteria:
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Tech workers
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Those who do not have underlying health conditions
Please see the below survey responses.
We received 58 responses from our screener survey and we solidified 14 interview candidates as a result from these responses. From our personal connections we confirmed 4 interview candidates, resulting in a total of 18 interviews completed.
We interviewed a total of 8 healthcare professionals and 10 non-healthcare individuals all between the ages of 24 and 52.
We created two separate lists of interview questions. One list was targeted towards non-healthcare professionals to gauge patients/clients frustrations and one list was targeted towards healthcare professionals to understand potential frustrations from the healthcare professional end.
Research Synthesis
Following our interviews, we synthesized the key points including likes and dislikes from our interviewees with affinity mapping.
Please see the resulting affinity map below.
As you can see, the largest frustrations experienced by our interviewees include the following needs:
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Personalization within the web application
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Simplicity
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An expansive food option list
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Accessible education
Following our research synthesis, we've come to define our problem: Health-conscious patients seek a user-friendly, multilingual health app with personalized features, addressing dissatisfaction with complex fitness apps, sparse food options, limited education resources and privacy concerns for a more streamlined and efficient healthcare management experience.
Ideation
User Persona
Using the information gathered from our user interviews, we identified trends and common pain points to create our persona “Gunther Smith.” By having a user persona to reference, we were able to make design decisions to make sure we were designing for our respective audience.
Please see below for the user persona.
Additionally, we focused on two user stories to prioritize which particular solutions we could ideate.
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As a health-conscious user, I want access to a platform that guides me through the curated meal plans, so that I can ensure a diverse range of healthy food options for easy and enjoyable meal planning while promoting proper nutrition.
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As a fitness-driven user. I want a simple calorie tracking feature that allows me to easily track my calorie intake, so that I can visually monitor my progress and stay accountable to my health objectives.
Solution Sketch
Our team executed a Crazy 8 activity, fostering creativity. Focused on user-centric design, we aimed to streamline food logging, track exercises impacting caloric retention, and enhance communication with dietitians.
Our solution incorporated a curated weekly meal plan, flexible food logging options, a search bar with barcode scanning and speech-to-text features, and direct views of calories consumed and overall progress.
User Flows
As part of our ideation process supported by research results, we created the below user flows.
Usability Testing
In order to make sure we were designing with a user first mindset, we conducted usability tests with our wireframes.
We first conducted tests on our “Home Page” wireframe. We designed this wireframe to have services, reviews, healthy recipe recommendations, blog posts and information on medical nutrition therapy.
However, user testing resulted in feedback that the homepage was too cluttered and users suggested that some of the information would need to be broken out into separate pages. Such information included the blog post and in-depth information about nutritional therapy. We then iterated on our wireframe to incorporate this feedback as seen below.
Additionally, we conducted a usability test on the “Patient Portal Dashboard (My Weekly Plan).” The first iteration of this design included a carousel for users to scroll through their weekly meal plan and the wireframe also had three buttons under each image of their meal. These buttons allowed for the actions “see recipe,” “skip meal” and “log meal.”
Following usability test feedback, users found this interaction annoying and preferred to see all of their meals at once. Users also through the three call to action buttons were odd and not visually appealing.
As a result, we iterated on our design to accommodate this feedback and landed on the below changes.
Final Prototype
Following the usability testing and iterations, we present to you the below high-fidelity prototype.
Next Steps & Takeaways
Our next steps include integration with wearable devices, augmented reality features, additional testing, increased capabilities, and ensuring language options are inclusive.
For this group project, I reflected on the following key takeaways.
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Clarify expectations and continue to communicate the main goal throughout the campaign
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Delegate tasks appropriately when leading a particular aspect of the project
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