Platano: Personal Health Management

Platano is a mobile application used by clinicians at Dell Medical Center, designed to help users self-manage personal health and Type 2 Diabetes. Through tracking meals, setting goals, monitoring progress, and getting feedback, not only are users better able to understand their diagnoses, but healthcare providers are also better able to provide personalized and accurate care. Platano is primarily used in clinics with under-/un-insured patients throughout the U.S. - patients at these clinics have varying degrees of tech literacy.

• Engage participants from underserved communities in gathering data

• Transform patient-generated data into knowledge for patients and providers

• Include data beyond diet to help patients achieve goals and develop actionable insights

Platano should make it easy for users to self-monitor, set goals, enter data, and track progress

CLIENT KICKOFF

ABRIDGED COMPARATIVE EVALUATION

LEAN UX CANVAS

USER SCENARIO

Creating a user scenario made it possible to focus deeply on specific functionality during design

WIREFRAMES

DESIGN PROCESS

SELECTED HI-FI MOCKUPS

FULL PROTOTYPE WALKTHROUGH 

Getting feedback throughout proved essential on a project I otherwise completed individually

LESSONS LEARNED

When there are many opportunities for improvement, it can be helpful to identify a specific area to focus on, whether that is through a user scenario, survey data, interview feedback, etc.

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While it can be tempting to create elaborate designs, it is important to keep the needs of the users in mind, especially if they are a certain demographic. In my case, I needed to balance the desire for experimental design with the functionality that might accessible to users in my population, with varying degrees of tech-literacy.

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Even when working on a project alone, it is necessary to get feedback from others on my designs. Although user testing was out of scope for this project, discussions and feedback with peers helped me to advance my design and clarify some of the functionality.

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Although it can be time-consuming, it is better to go into too much detail first and then step back to choose an area to focus on, rather than staying too much at the surface level and not digging into the actual problem space.

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If I could expand on this project, I would explore solutions to help users with Type 2 Diabetes log their glucose levels and other health data. While I am happy with the area that I worked on, I feel there is a lot of opportunity in the space of monitoring glucose levels for those who do not have access to sophisticated monitoring technologies.