Fibro is an app that has been designed for those who live with Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain disorder. The app is meant to track symptoms, weather, eating habits, and exercise while helping patients discover their triggers and better manage their symptoms.
The Problem:
this project, there were a few issues that I wanted to tackle. The first, and most important, was finding an organized and easy way of tracking your symptoms. People with Fibromyalgia know how variable their symptoms can be, and sometimes it seems like they come out of nowhere, just because the smallest things can set them off. I wanted a thorough tracking system that covered all trigger bases so that users could go back in their daily logs to find out why their symptoms have begun to flare up. Just having an organized backlog of this information can help patients start to manage their symptoms and it also could be useful during doctor visits.
The second issue was resolving the hassle with tracking apps in general. I wanted to make sure this app wasn’t a burden to its users to ensure they continued to use it past their first few days of motivated usage. Through research and personal experience, I have found that many people cease use of tracking apps just after a week of signing up for them. For me, it has been because of the many forms or entries that you’re required to fill out on a daily basis. Many trackers aren’t designed very intuitively, and I wanted to change that with the fibro app.
The Process:
I began this project with research. I wanted to make sure I fully understood the condition from a medical standpoint. I did research about how different things, like diet and weather, affect someone with fibromyalgia, as well as what patients should be incorporating in their diets to help ease their symptoms. After the research, I created the user personas.
The logo came fairly quickly after the user personas. I wanted to do something modern with the logo, but I decided to leave some fragility to represent the butterfly and its meaning in the Fibromyalgia community. I did that through the colors as well as the transparent elements in the logo and throughout the app.
The logo depicts a purple butterfly in a minimalistic style. I chose this specific image because the butterfly is the symbol for Fibromyalgia, representing how something so small can set off a painful reaction in patients. Purple is the color of awareness for this disorder, so the color scheme is built of different shades of purple. I created two different colorways so that the logo would be applicable to a light and a dark background.
The app has been designed completely in dark mode to help patients that are sensitive to light. To further help patients that have light sensitivity, fibro has the ability to speak to the user and recite their symptom summaries, so there is no need to look at the screen. The high contrast design helps patients quickly decipher the information and graphics so that they are not prolonging their screen time. The app has simple and quick daily forms for patients to fill out to track their food and water intake and their general symptoms to also help with cutting down screen time. Information like the weather and your exercise metrics can be synced directly from your phone’s weather and health apps.
