Outcomes4Me Homepage

Launched Late 2019

Outcomes4Me is a startup with a mobile app for breast cancer patients.
As lead/sole designer, I was responsible for all of the company’s design needs.

Before & After

It’s not hard to make the business case for an app’s homepage — we needed something more engaging, dynamic, and helpful.

I conducted all user research and discovery, UI design and prototyping, kept our design system updated, and coordinated with engineering for implementation and QA testing.

There were a few goals for this redesign:

Surface new content relevant to a patient’s individual diagnosis (user goal)
Increase user retention and engagement by giving a meaningful reason to return to the app (business goal)
Re-structure the app around features that patients used most often (user goal)

Research

In user interviews, I talked to patients about what their daily needs and activities were and recurring themes began to emerge:

Logging and managing symptoms
Staying on top of the latest news
Looking for any updates relevant to their diagnosis

In addition, to help achieve our own business goal of increased user engagement, I took inspiration from models used effectively by other platforms — specifically apps like AirBnB, Coinbase, and Spotify that use personalized homepages with fresh content.

I also wanted the homepage to be future-proof and allow us the flexibility to easily incorporate new features later, a goal which quickly lead me to using a modular structure.

Constraints

One of the main constraints I had was that our app was fairly limited in the amount of new content being aggregated and pulled in. New content would make it easier to bring patients back and keep them engaged but, unfortunately, it wasn’t a priority to spend time engineering new content streams. The only existing two data streams into the app that automatically updated with new content, were the news articles and clinical trials. Because they updated most often, I immediately knew these two types of content would likely play a large role in the new homepage.

Design Iterations

More content. More dynamic.

My first iteration for the redesign. Whereas the original design had a lot of wasted blank space, this new layout maximized the available space with content that immediately engaged users.

Moreover, the content is fresh and matched to each patient’s individual diagnosis so users get useful information as soon as they open the app.

Finally, I made a case for including pictures with the news articles in this design to make the content more engaging.

New layout to meet patient needs

There was still room for improvement in the app’s navigation. Based on patient interviews and usage analytics, our CEO suggested rearranging the app’s bottom tab bar with Treatments, Clinical Trials and Symptoms.

I also added a new menu bar of shortcuts at the top so that users could find other features they had told us were valuable but hard to find.

Most importantly, I added a shortcut to quickly log symptoms which made it easier for patients to manage their care while also helping our business strategy of aggregating patient data that will be helpful for clinical researchers.

Final Design

Daily check-ins for patients

After the previous iteration, I did some research interviews with patients to get feedback on the design.

I was trying to increase engagement even more beyond the draw of news and clinical trials — something a patient had said in a research session stuck out to me: “the nice thing about keeping a log or journal is that you can look back and see that maybe the past month was better than you thought.”

This gave me the idea for daily check-ins — helpful for patients to analyze trends and also helpful for our company by increasing engagement.

Though I liked the idea, I was hesitant that “How are you feeling?” might feel odd coming from an app but learned that patients were actually very positive on the idea. One told me: “even though it’s an app, it’s still nice to be asked because I can only tell my family so many times that I don’t feel well.”

The final result is this design, which helped lead to drastic increases for some of our engagement and retention metrics.