GlucoTrend

Research and Insights

Research

Conducted Interviews

Individually I was able to conduct three interviews, two on type 1 patients and one type 2 patient.

To gain deeper insight, I used tactics such as open ended questions and asked them to draw pictures.

In total I read ten peer-reviewed medical journals about type 1 diabetes and tactics of self-care management.

I especially looked at articles from MayoClinic’s website to understand the platform better.

Target Users

Type 1 Diabetes

Younger Adults (18 - 30)

Newly Diagnosed

&

Providers

We realized that it would be vital to design for the user experience of both the patient and their health care providers.

In my research, I found that newly diagnosed T1DM patients struggle most with:

• Emotional health management after diagnosis, because there is no known cure

• Finding a community of other Type 1 patients to interact with

• Committing to a completely new lifestyle that is time consuming but necessary to live

This is what our team’s shared Drive folder for our foundational research looked like. The above list was not exhaustive by any means- we of course had to constantly update our research throughout the project as it rapidly evolved!

At first we had a much broader focus that covered both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, for people of any age, and did not consider length of diagnosis. We ran into quite a few issues with scale due to the relatively limited scope of the project timeline, and as such we decided to narrow our target audience. Through our research we identified younger adults who are newly diagnosed with type 1 had the most needs.

Empathy maps we filled out based on real interviews we conducted (fake names and pictures).

These are the summarized personas from a type 1 patient (purple), and a type 2 patient (blue). We decided to interview both types regardless of our scope in order to better understand diabetes as a whole.

Current and future state storyboards I created to better understand how GlucoTrend could help our type 1 users.

I was drawn to take on the community feature because of how often the mental health issue came up while reviewing medical journals, my interview notes, and day in the life vlogs. It became apparent that a lack of social support and connection were major road blocks for the patients motivation to comply with creating and maintaining a self-care management plan.

• Slow communication

• Appointment logistics

• A lot of communication sources to monitor

• Obtaining and reading data quickly

• Non-compliant patients

• HIPAA considerations

• Existing software systems in healthcare considerations

Providers

“I am a medical provider that is trying to help a new type 1 diabetes patient with their self-care plan, but my current systems take up a lot of time, which makes me feel frustrated.”