Visual Design Collage

Summary

Akeso is a platform for families to prevent and manage Type 2 Diabetes together. The project was placed as a design challenge finalist for the Berkeley-Haas Healthcare Conference 2015. We've recently received news that our work will be shared with the CDC.

As a designer for the team, my responsibilities included visual design, UX/UI design, and branding. I also collaborated with other team members from different disciplines on ideation, user research, market research, ethnographic studies, competitor analysis, and business model. This case study will focus mostly on the design process.

 

The problem

Type 2 Diabetes is a lifestyle disease that is difficult to prevent and manage without having a supportive system in place. Current solutions are lacking in providing a comprehensive platform for both prevention and management of the disease. Most importantly, these solutions are not empowering the family unit as a whole: Diabetes is not an individual, isolated disease. Additionally, the national cost for diabetes management is astronomical.

 

Our Solution

We created a two-part solution, a companion app and a subscription box, to deliver the following:

  • Family participation
  • Professional support
  • Tailored information
  • Convenient management tools

 

User Research

After interviewing patients with diabetes and healthcare professionals with expertise in treating this chronic disease, we found a common theme of "family" present in all treatment and management strategies. This finding is reflected throughout our product.

 

Visual Branding

In creating a family-oriented digital health solution, I wanted to expand upon the usual "medical blue" and "medical green", which convey professionalism and confidence, to include a warmer color for family-friendliness. The color palette was created using Coolors.co. The selected typography is also less institutional and more welcoming. Here is the style guide I established for the team to use in pitch deck and app design.



The logo is a stylized origami hummingbird, a nod to the popular paper crane, simple and playful. Hummingbirds are known for their sugar-based nectar diets, but their feeding practices and high activity levels represent the lifestyle changes we want to introduce. These birds have also been seen to take great care of their offsprings.

 

High-fidelity design mocks

Since we were on a tight timeline to create something presentable and polished for the pitch competition, I decided to focus on creating some sample screens, instead of going through low-fidelity design steps. This was a challenge in itself—producing seemingly final designs without proper wireframes and iterations.

The message we wanted to present through the app was the overarching theme of "family" and accessibility to a healthcare professional that could fit in 1 minute of presentation. Here are the screens I created to tell this narrative. We decided to use characters from a well-known family: The Incredibles.


The getting started screen walks a user through adding her family members


An overview dashboard showing progress and vitals of family members


A health coach can be reached via messaging or a video call

 

Results

I was able to present these screens as a sample patient journey in the alloted 1 minute (out of 5 minutes total for the pitch presentation). These screens allowed us to show, at a high level, how a family can participate and track everyone's progress, and how a user can conveniently reach a health coach.