Fast food, sugar, stress, lack of sleep and exercises, these factors have causing many people lose a balance in their health. How to provide a service that can help people take charge of their health, this was a what we want to achieve.
It is not easy to have people start to manage their health, even some patients. Sometimes unhealthy life style seems quite 'joyful", but to manage means need to put extra effort to exercise, to give up some food, to calculate calories, etc. Why bother? As long as it is not an issue yet, people tend to stay their unhealthy life style, enjoy the pleasant moment, and ignore the long term trend which lead to problems.
Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. -- Wikipedia
So how shall we design the product, make people feel simple and easy to manage their health, be aware of his/her own health situation and the trend, hence start to control their own health.
1. Design a mirror of health
Almost every people like to look at themselves through the mirror, especially in the morning, after shower. People care about how they look, then in front of the mirror, fix their hair, dress up, make sure they are in good shape before go out. So what if we give them a mirror which reflex their health situation?
That is why at the homepage of MyVitals app, I designed a human body, this human body is just like a virtual representation of the owner. Its figure will change based on the owners' weight and BMI number; his most up to date blood pressure reading, blood oxygen level, etc. will be displayed.
A visualized seesaw to show his/her today's balance of calories intake and consumption. Hence stimulate the user to manage and maintain a good balance.
My idea in the future is that, we should even be able to visually find out other potential health risks; by adjusting the timeline, and be able to see how himself/herself will like in the near future according to his/her current health pattern.
2. Give immediate feed back
I believe the reason many people is addicted to slot machine gambling is because it is so quick to know the result, win or lose. Not that many people has that kind of patience to put a long string waiting for a big fish. So in my design, I always tend to give the users the information right away, and together with visual language to tells him/her how he/she is doing, just a healthcare personnel is right besides him/her.
3. Use unified design language and task flow logic
There are many hardware devices can be connected to MyVitals via bluetooth, blood pressure monitor, blood oximeter, activity tracker, body analysis scale, etc. We want people to use anyone of them with the same experience, thus it can be easy to use. For example, every testing is just as simple as click the big circled button, then it will have a small gif animation to tell users that the product is working on to deliver a result. (Of course, every gif animation is slightly different based on which device it is)
No matter it is for blood pressure monitor or activity tracker, it always has the same set of features, test, trend, list (of logs), and share.
4. Visualize, visualize and visualize
Visualization is a powerful tool, and which is a designer's job. Health data can be boring, and can be a mess if without a clue of what is about. All the data/history, trends, has been visualized for users to easily understand how they are doing.
5. Bring in caregivers and social feature
"Someone is watching", such hint can always make people start to behave and do the "right" thing. Users can connect with their caregivers, can decide what data can be fully or partial released to the caregivers. Users can define inner circle and outside circle of his/her caregivers based on how close is their relationship. They can view the data of person he/she cares, and they can communicate within the app as well.
