Helpsy Health
Shipped iOS App
How can we motivate Cancer patients to try home-based remedies?
About
Helpsy’s mission is to empower people to have the best health outcomes through a platform that provides access to symptom-based remedies and assists in scheduling appointments with local providers.
Challenge
To Translate Helpsy’s web app into a native iOS app. Helpsy wanted the app in time for the Cancer Survivorship conference to present to patient advocates. The timeline was one month.
My Role
As the Product Design Lead, I worked with the founder, developer, and one other designer to create the app.
Outcomes
- User experience designed
- Style Guide and customized icons
- Redefined metrics
- Shipped app
Sneak Peak
My Approach
Cancer Patient Journey
Previous research shed led on a cancer patient's journey.
When patients first get diagnosed, they are more willing to seek help and find resources. However, after treatment, patients tend to feel guilty, due to the emotional and financial impact on their families. They are less likely to take extra measures to treat their health. Therefore, we suggested implementing alternative methods to alleviate side effects earlier on in their treatment journey.
Analyzing Assumptions & Defining Metrics
We have made predictions of how people will engage with it, but how do we test it?
I led an assumptions brainstorming session with the founder to prioritize unanswered questions.
In order to work, effectively, the app relied heavily on customer behavior. For each high-risk assumption, I defined a key metic to assess results.
Storyboarding and Task Flows
Crafting the Experience
Prototyping
The premise was that users would add their individual symptoms and find remedies for each that they could refer to. Yet, the problem was that Helpsy Health provided access to several remedies just for one symptom type. There were over 20 remedy classifications. While developing the lofi prototype, I brainstormed ways to reduce the cognitive load for users.
Style Elements
Standout Features
Symptoms Overview
Returning users land on the 'Daily Tracker' screen when they enter the app. Here they can see an overview of their current symptoms with relative severities. Users can also easily swipe to resolve or remove symptoms.
View Individual Symptoms
Users can adjust their symptom severity, resolve, or delete the symptom. All of their applicable remedies are accessible here as popovers.
How can we encourage people to complete the remedies, consistently?
Remedy Tracker Before
The current web app prompts the user to update their symptoms and then asks if the user has completed the remedies all at once, which could cause users to leave the app
Remedy Tracker After
To keep users engaged, I created a 'Daily Tracker' to show which remedies were pending each day. Users would be prompted to mark them as complete.
I suggested Helpsy could later use this data to show which remedies caused a reduction of the symptoms if tracked, properly.
Takeaways
The crux of the problem lay in how to empower users to take control of their health and to easily navigate through the wealth of information offered by Helpsy’s platform. It was challenging to create an app that relied heavily on user engagement without frequent user validation due to the time constraints.
Patient advocates we spoke to felt that the overview of symptoms as the initial screen could be discouraging. The next steps would be to robustly validate the current features before adding on more. Engagement metrics will be very useful to assess once Helpsy has enough data.