Managing symptoms and side effects is often a daily struggle for breast cancer patients and can continue to be a struggle even after their treatment has ended. Patients have to deal with things like headaches, fatigue, and numbness / nerve damage all while attempting to maintain their life and go to work.

Fortunately, patients can do something about their symptoms and the Outcomes4Me app aims to help them. Research has shown, for instance, that tracking symptoms can help improve patient outcomes (source). Also, there are often medications or other interventions that patients may not know about.

For users, this is a huge opportunity for us to help them feel better. For the company, a valuable feature that meaningfully helped patients on a daily basis would also support our goals for user engagement and growth.

As the company’s product designer, my role was to conduct the user research, create the mockups and prototypes, maintain documentation and our design system, and work closely with engineering before and after handoff for smooth implementation.

Research

I started with talking to users. Painful side effects from disease and treatment are a constant struggle for many patients and their experiences can also vary widely, so I wanted to get a wide range of perspectives and see how a wide variety of patients dealt with this. I asked patients questions like:

“What’s your current system for keeping track of your symptoms?”

“What questions does your care team ask you about your symptoms?”

“Where do you currently get advice on how to manage your side effects?”

We came away with some really useful insights and also clear goals that helped shape the vision of the feature. One insight that stood out was that many patients don’t have a system at all for tracking their symptoms. I also learned that for some patients, one of the benefits they find in tracking is that, “it’s just nice to be able to look back and see that I had a better month than I thought I did.”

And, consistent with something many of patients told us over the years, while some patients got symptom management advice from their nurses and care team, a lot of communication about management advice happens in forums and facebook groups where patients share tips amongst themselves but that they would welcome an evidence-backed option as well.

We also talked to a few nurses, who told us that when patients keep track of their symptoms, it can help improve communication during visits with the care team. Strategically, this seemed to me like a great opportunity for product design to lead to organic growth: if we can help create more efficient and more valuable care team visits, doctors and nurses would see value in the Outcomes4Me app and want to share the app with other patients which would help our company grow, help more patients feel better, and help the care team effectively help their patients — a huge win for everyone.

Talking with patients and nurses gave us clarity on what the feature should help patients achieve:

1. View a log of those symptoms and see trends / patterns

2. Get management help for the side effects they experience

3. Logging symptoms is as quick and easy as possible

Ideas and Sketches

The most important and core part of the feature was how to display and visualize the logged data in a way that was simple and helped patients find useful trends without the heavy lifting of them doing data analysis. I considered several types of charts and visualizations but a horizontal bar chart quickly became the obvious choice because of the space it allowed for text

Mockups

One thing we considered was whether the feature should make all content available, regardless of whether a patient had logged that symptom, so patients could explore the feature like an encyclopedia.

However, ultimately we decided against that because the app’s core value is a personalizing to the patients’s individual experience, and this would be antithetical to that perspective, not to mention a more complicated and confusing information architecture.