Living with RA
TOOLS
Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere, Canva, Pen & Paper.
RA patients and how to understand their needs and strugglies
At first we always try to understand the user, those users are special though because they spent the most part of their social life trying to make others understand their needs and strugglies. If you really want to know them, besides the numerous surveys and medical reserches out there, you can find countless RA community forums and personal blogspots discussing how living with this condition really is. If you want to dig in you can find here some of the websites I found really useful over the years.
Every RA patient experiences quite different symptoms, but there are some things that are common for all of them. First of all they have to closely monitor their symptoms and vitals every day. They have to take numerous medications and visit doctors multiple times a year. They all need to follow a balanced diet and work out on a daily basis even if they are in pain or really tired and they usually don’t sleep well and wake up in pain and feeling tired. Lastly they all need to feel they belong in a community and that they are strong and able to go on.
Now let’s put a face to every single on of the RA warriors out there and try to know them better.
I wrote down all the needs and frustrations I could find and turns out they fitted in three distinct categories. Find my pinboard below.
Can we help?
Obviously we can’t help with our users’ symptoms, that’s their doctor’s job, but we can help with everyday managing of this condition.
During the competitive analysis phase we found dozens of health tracking apps, but they all seemed to have targeted older people. Their purpose was to either remind the patients-users of their medication or keep track of specific vitals such as blood pressure, blood glucose etc.
A patient could also use a seperate fitness tracking app, to monitor nutrition and work-outs. Those apps are much more youthful and pleasant to use, but they have a very important drawback. They focus too much on counting cals, micronutrients and work out minutes. Another common thing about those users is stress. Knowing that it is the worst idea to make them count even more things on a daily basis provoking even more stress and guilt.
With everything I knew about the user and my competitive analysis done I started drafting my screen sketches and low fidelity wireframes you can check below.
You can check out my lofi prototype in Figma here!
My Logo and colors
The rheumatoid arthritis official colors according to the disease ribbon are indigo (symbolising wisdom, understanding and awareness) and gold (symobolising hope and truth). We kept purple and turned gold in a more vibrant yellow. We need a happy app here.
You can check out my design system in Figma here.
High Fidelity designs
Please find below the reasoning behind some of the app’s features explained.
You can check all of my high fidelity designs and play around with my prototype here.
User Testing, Challenges & Conclusions
I have given the app for testing to a few good friends from the RA community, apart from being grateful for someone trying to help them, they managed to use all the features without any help from me, but they all agreed that it needs to be more social platform centered, that it shouldn’t feel like a lonely experience.
The real challenge with the design of this app is the same as the challenge with the disease itself. Rheumatoid arthritis is a systemic condition, in the same way this is an app that needs to monitor multiple aspects of everyday life at once.
I sure have a lot more to do here, but this was the first design that made me feel proud I could help.
