Common Gaps in Healthcare:
People endure distress and misdiagnoses due to inadequate information and communication within the healthcare system.

Need for Convenient Support:
People with long-term pain often resort to online resources rather than their healthcare provider due to the costs and convenience.

Personal Empowerment:
‍What if there was an app that helped people track symptoms and provide reliable info to empower users managing symptoms?

This project followed a standard double diamond design thinking process. What makes this project particularly interesting is how a willingness to pivot, while guided by my key values, improved my final product. So part of my focus of this presentation is to highlight those moments

Over the course of three weeks I conducted semi-structured interviews with 9 participants of varying condition and 2 experts in patient care, lasting around 30 minutes each.

I managed all aspects of the research for ComfortCheck, from writing the session guide and recruiting participants to conducting the interviews. The sessions were remote, semi-structured and lasted 30 minutes.

The goals of the interviews were to learn:

• Current methods people have for treating pain at home
  

• What support do users need to manage their conditions
  

• What issues do providers in healthcare face with long term patients
  

Conflicting and unreliable information can make it difficult to know what’s accurate.

Common symptoms like fatigue and joint pain can be too vague for doctors to diagnose accurately, making it harder to identify chronic conditions.

Doctors need access to a patient’s symptom history over time—especially for those with chronic conditions.

After defining the core problem, I shifted my focus to key design goals — areas where my solution could create the most impact."To guide my design decisions, I framed these goals as 'How Might We' questions

Comfortcheck is built around four core features designed to make managing your health easier:

• The Symptom Finder helps users identify possible conditions based on what they’re experiencing.
  

• The Health Hub simplifies tracking symptoms and trends over time.
  

• The Condition Guide provides a trusted source for researching conditions, and the personalized
  

• Your News feature keeps users informed with relevant new updates per their preferences.
  

I focused my time creating high-quality components in Figma to create a fully responsive and adaptable product across any mobile device. I decided to use blue to instill a sense of calmness and relaxation. I learned this through reading color psychology articles explaining the different emotions of each color.

Through synthesizing primary research findings, I was able to create simple models to help inform the rest of the design.
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I examined the participants' interviews by coding responses and grouping affinities based on themes and topics. From this analysis, I created diagrams to outline task hierarchy, define user classes, and develop advanced flow models to inform the design process.

Difficult finding available users to meet in-person. Adopted remote research methods, utilizing surveys, recorded interviews, and AI tools to streamline synthesis and extract insights effectively.

Maintained consistency by using Figma’s Auto Layout and design systems to create responsive UI components that could be replicated throughout my design to save valuable time

Next Steps
If given more time, I would gather usability data and benchmarks, analyze errors and successes, refine the prototype to address new concerns, and conduct further testing

Empathy was key to tackling this problem. By understanding users’ challenges, I was able to create an app that not only addresses their needs but also gives them the tools to take control of their health.