Tracking health events for you and your family
Side Project
As a parent of two kids and owner of pets, I've always wanted an easy way to track health events for my whole family and to have immediate access to this data:
When was the last time my son was sick? What did he have?
How many times this year have I caught the flu?
Who was the doctor that checked my daughter last time she had a foot injury?
What medicine did I take last year when I got food poisoning?
When was the last time my dog had a shot?
An app to track it all
As a side project, I decided to design an app that would help me answer all of the above, and more. This app should track any heath-related event of all our family members, including our pets.
It should be easy to use and the user should be able to add as little or as much data as they want or need for any event.
The dashboard
I decided to start by designing the app's dashboard. The main goal of the dashboard is to show the user a summary of a family member's events, as well as letting them know all the actions they can take on the app.
The main actions are:
Select a family member
Add an event
View the member's info:
Profile
History
Meds
Doctors
Appointments
Search
The main section of this view is a graph that shows the year's events represented as blobs. From the start I chose to use the blob to represent a health event. It's circular imperfection felt like a great representation of person's health.
Each event would get it's own blob shape, with a different color and size, depending on the length or severity of the event.
The toolbar
I went through several iterations of the toolbar, and ultimately landed on the version above. The toolbar should easily let me pick a family member (and manage members from that same view), should clearly show which family member's info I'm looking at, as well as offer options for searching and a settings menu.
History
One of the main views of the app is the history of events. This is where I see the app having the most potential to provide usefulness and insights. By looking at a timeline of your or a family member's events, we can get a high-level picture of the overall and identify patterns or seasonal symptoms.
I explored a few variations of this view, like displaying events on a list, or on a graph, but ultimately decided on the last version below, which simplifies the UI by combining both formats in a single view:
Adding an event
As I mentioned above, the app should be very forgiving on how much info it asks for any particular event being added. I want the process of adding an event to be as painless and frictionless as possible, and allow the user to add as much info as they want or need.
This means that all the app requires for any event is the title. Everything else is pre-filled with defaults and can be left as is, or can be edited. The user can change the defaults, such as the type of event: symptom, medicine, appointment (check-up, therapy, etc), as well as link to a previously recorded event.
Member profile
For a member's profile, I wanted to follow the same principle of asking as little as possible from the user. All the app asks is a member's name, and the user can decide how little or how much info they add.
Each member would get an auto-generated colorful profile image, or a photo can be added instead.
A flexible color system
I also designed custom iconography for the different categories of events:
Keeping track of medicines and doctors
I also designed additional views for keeping track of medicines taken, appointments or therapy sessions, as well as a member's doctors.
Each category shows related data, for example, if I'm looking at a medicine that I took, I can also see what event I took it for, when, for how long, and the doctor who prescribed it.
Side projects are fun
While development of the app was put on hold, this was a really cool and fun side project to work on, and a good reminder that it's always good to stretch the creative muscles and get out of our routine.
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