Outcomes4Me Treatment Path
Launched Early 2019
An important part of a cancer patient’s experience is the many treatments they have to go through over the course of months or even years. This sequence of multiple treatments often involves drugs, surgeries, and radiation.
Helping patients understand this sequence of treatments is one of the main features of the Outcomes4Me app. The previous experience, however, was overwhelming and confusing so I was tasked with redesigning and improving the entire feature.
Displaying treatments is complicated — there are dozens of different treatment regimens, multiple drug options for each treatment, all compounded by the possibility that a patient’s treatment plan may need to change later. Since I lead the company’s design, I was tasked with redesigning an elegant solution to display relevant information while addressing the many intricacies and use cases.
Research
Talking with patients is essential for a feature as complex as displaying treatment regimens so I teamed up with our CEO and our Clinical Operations Manager to conduct hour-long, in-depth interviews with patients. We asked them what they thought of the current Outcomes4Me experience, what other information sources they found helpful, what their struggles were, and what questions they had about their treatment.
After these interviews, we distilled their answers into a large spreadsheet to get a macro view where we could compare everyone’s answers on the same topic and find commonalities. (Unfortunately this is still an internal document that can’t be shared)
Old Design — Categorical View
The previous design was organized by treatment categories, regardless of when a patient when take that drug. This made it very difficult for patients to understand the sequential nature of cancer treatment.
These treatment categories were then followed by a second screen where a patient could navigate further to drug details for that treatment or move through to the next step in their treatment.
This information hierarchy was confusing and you very quickly get lost clicking through multiple pages.
Sketches / Wireframes
I came up with two main directions for the new design where the user can swipe either horizontally or vertically. I chose the vertical option because the patient can see more of their treatments on-screen at the same time. This makes it easier for them to get an intuitive overview of their treatments, one of the main goals of the redesign.
New Design — A Sequential Path
1) Clarity — Instead of having their treatments spread out across multiple pages, patients can now see an overview of their entire treatment sequence on the same page. This makes the page much easier to understand and more intuitive.
2) Focus — The first page focuses solely on categories and the individual drugs/treatments inside those categories are now moved to the second page. Previously, having both category and individual drug on the same page was confusing because they’re two different dimensions of information.
3) Medical nuance — It’s an elegant solution for showing patients important clinical details (e.g. when a treatment is optional or yet to be determined) but does so in a way that isn’t overwhelming.
Overall, this redesign helped increase user engagement with the treatment section by making it 1) easy to navigate and 2) telling a clear story instead of letting users get lost in the complex minutiae.