UXR & UXD

A Community in Need of Support— Implementing Design Thinking to Attend to Known Pain Points:

This personal project was developed as an attempt to help the ever-growing community of Lyme Disease patients. Such a tricky and hard to navigate disease begs for clarity and answers to lasting health. Lyme Light allows patients to track their symptoms + medications while interacting with chronic illness communities to find solutions and comfort. Lyme Light features a customizable symptom and medicine tracker that allows people to log their daily experiences with and treatment of Lyme. The research around this application focuses on how to simplify the complicated nature of tracking a polysymptomatic disease and a framework to develop support groups and research for an under studied disease.

+Personal UX Project, 2020

Lyme Disease patients are overwhelmed

With the rise of Lyme Disease patients and influx of information concerning treatment options, patients are often overwhelmed by conflicting messages between different treatment groups. Currently many people suffer from chronic illnesses with too many symptoms and treatments to keep straight. Lyme Light will help log symptoms and medications making a hard to track diagnosis, simpler. Lyme Light improves the patient experience by keeping things organized and tracked.

The key questions:

• What is the most effective way to track the progression of a complex and idiosyncratic disease?

• What are some of the common consumer expectations for an application fit for lyme patients?

• What resources currently exist for those beginning their journey with and treatment of Lyme Disease?

• How can the forum adapt to assist users who suffer from severe fatigue?

Role & Team :

Initial research was conducted through a network of patients living with Lyme Disease or parents caring for children with Lyme.

• UX Designer + Design Researcher: Allie Henner

• Co-Researcher: Madison Pinckney

• Mentor: Hugh Knapp

Research Methods

The platform began its research by developing a series of personas that were best fit for the nature of the application. The two target users that were catered to were Lyme Disease patients and parents of children with Lyme Disease.

Introductory Exploration

• Conducted exploratory user interviews with a group of users with diverse genders, races, ages and medical expertise.

• Conceptual frameworks designed in order to explore and evaluate different means of enrollment based off of personas (patient, guardian to patient).

Evaluation Testing

• Conducting a series of rapid A/B testing in order to narrow down design direction for UX flow + visual style and effectiveness of tracking platform.

Different users need different things

Two classes of user personas were identified: adults with Lyme and guardians of individuals with Lyme

Combining the needs and pain points of these two sets of users ignited 3 functions:

1. Teach and Guide users new to navigating Lyme Disease

2. Help users Track the polysymptomatic disease and their various treatment plans

3. Provide the possibility for the development of Support groups

User Flow

Learning to pivot

Following the development of the generative and exploratory research, it became clear that the application being created needed to focus most on the individual patient experience through organization and support groups. The initial phases of design anticipated a platform that outlines the varying schools and approaches to Lyme Disease treatment. Unfortunately, this anticipated platform would be built off a series of trial error treatments that have no documented rate of success. As so, the project directed its attention to four main features: symptom tracker, medication tracker, holistic overview and support groups.

Made using Figma and Illustrator

Listening to users makes for a better product

Following the qualitative and quantitative research, the final mockup balanced concerns including, color choice for light sensitivity, inclusion of support groups for community building, a discovery page for Lyme Disease facts and news and more. In one of the rounds of resonance testing, users were concerned the color choices were not appropriate for those struggling with light sensitivity as a result of their Lyme Disease. The new color scheme was identified using a round fo A/B testing.

Designing + collaborating in the time of COVID-19

This project was developed through a series of collaborative meetings over zoom and other digital formats. Differences in timezones and the inability to design and critique in person inspired new forms of communication and developed an emphasis on storytelling during team calls. Prototyping and user testing resulted in a final iteration that was finished by late Summer 2020.